WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Fiction and the Reaction to Photography: Literalism, the Law and the Conditions and the Control of Reading from the Invention of Photography to the 1920s Mehmi, S. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Mr Suneel Mehmi, 2019. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] FICTION AND THE REACTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY: LITERALISM, THE LAW AND THE CONDITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF READING FROM THE INVENTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE 1920S SUNEEL MEHMI A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices. I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteen- twenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The study aims to illuminate how vision and reading are tied together and how visual codes are involved in how reading is experienced, conceptualised and carefully regulated. It also suggests how legal knowledge and methods of reading were a prime influence on fiction, its themes, how it was read and its readers. The representation of photography and reading in fiction itself can be linked to the legal prohibition of photography and photo-realistic artwork from the courtroom in the 1920s. Thus, the analysis of fiction itself illuminates the conceptualisation, truth status, authority and construction of the law and the way in which the law preserves its status through the ways in which it is read and envisaged. 1 LIST OF CONTENTS List of contents 2 List of figures 5 Author’s declaration 6 INTRODUCTION 7 Overview 7 Scholarship on the Relationship Between Victorian Photography and the Law 13 The Influence and Reinterpretation of Michel Foucault’s Panopticism 17 Scholarship on the Relationship Between Victorian Photography and Fiction 22 The Difference Between the Representation of Photography in Writing and the Adoption of Photography Outside of Writing 29 Legal Reading and Literalism 32 First Reading: Introducing Literalism and the Literalist and their Association with Photography, Art and Law 43 Second Reading: Literalism, Literalists and the Work of Gendering in Fiction 56 Third Reading: Fiction and the Prohibition of Photography from the Courtroom in 1925 65 Chapter 1: REPRESENTATION OF PHOTOGRAPHY, LITERALIST READING AND “THE ABSENCE OF HIGHER TRUTHS” IN ART 70 Fine Art, Art Criticism and Photography 70 John Ruskin: Photography and Artistic Truth 74 Ruskin, the Literalism of Photography, Hidden Truth and the Power of Reading 83 Ruskin on the Relationship Between Reading, the Law and Power 89 The Representation of Women: Exploring Art’s Gendered Idea of Photography’s Literalism and Reading the Law 91 Art, Reading and Photography in Fiction 105 Conclusion 113 2 Chapter 2: PHOTOGRAPHY’S “FATAL RESEMBLANCES”: READING THE INVISIBILITY OF INDIVIDUALITY AND TRUTH IN THE WORK OF WILKIE COLLINS 115 Introduction 115 Wilkie Collins, Truth and Photography 117 Individuality, the Identity Photograph and the Law 122 The Relationship Between Scientific Photography and the Murder of the Individual: Copying and “Fatal Resemblances” 126 Constructing a Reading of Individuality and Legal Truth against the Threat of Resemblance 135 Group Identity vs. Individual Identity: The Political Dimensions of Reading as an Exclusion of Finding and Exploiting Resemblances 144 Conclusion 154 Chapter 3: REPRESENTATION AND READING AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHIC DETAILS IN THE WORK OF HENRY JAMES 156 Overview 156 Photography and its Particularity: Details and Women 160 Particulars and Particularism as an Alternative to Conventionally Reading the Law 168 Blindness, Reading and Truth 192 Conclusion 200 Chapter 4: PHOTOGRAPH ALBUMS IN FICTION - THE ILLEGITIMATE PLOTS AND COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF THE PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK 203 Overview 206 The Context to the Relationship Between the Photograph Album, Art and Fiction 204 A Fictional Representation of the Photographic Album as a Narrative Powerhouse 209 3 Fiction’s Response to the Threat of the Photograph Album’s Writing Through the Lens of the Law: The Construction of the Failed and Illegitimate Plot of Characters 215 Fiction’s Inventive Literary Criticism of the Plot Associated with the Photograph Album 220 Fiction’s “Legitimate” Counter Plot as it Emerges Through Contrast to the Photograph Book Plot 228 The Mirroring of Legitimate Plots and Illegitimate Plots and How a Reading of the Law Emerges out of the Mirror Relationship 232 Conclusion: The Success of the Concealed Legitimate Plot 241 CONCLUSION 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY 254 Introduction 254 Chapter 1 259 Chapter 2 265 Chapter 3 269 Chapter 4 274 Select General Bibliography 278 4 LIST OF FIGURES fig. 1 Painting. J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the p. 8 Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843, oil paint on canvas, 787 x 787 mm, Tate Gallery. fig. 2 Painting. Frederick Daniel Hardy, The Young Photographers, 1862, oil p.95 on panel, 12” x 18”, Ashton Bequest, Tunbridge Wells Museum. fig. 3 Plate. Robert Hunt, A Manual of Photography (London and Glasgow: p.99 Richard Griffin and Company, 1854), 3. fig. 4 Painting. Frederick Daniel Hardy, The Dismayed Artist, 1866, p.102 oil on canvas, 45.5 x 61cm. Wolverhampton: Wolverhampton Art Gallery. fig. 5 Painting. Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, c. 1540, p.196 oil on panel, 101 × 82.8 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: _________________ Date: 14.01.2019 6 Introduction How does fiction respond to the invention of photography? If we investigate fiction’s response to photography, does an identifiable, historic visual regime emerge in writing around ideas and representations of photography? What relationship would this historic visual regime have with ideas and representations of law and reading? There has been scholarship which would suggest that fiction would support a particular, identifiable visual regime, although it does not include the analysis of representations of photography, the law or reading. Works such as Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1992) have focused on the prime influence of scientific understandings of vision and changing ideas about the role of the observer. They have suggested that such scientific conceptions have influenced cultural production after the invention of photography. Thus, one crucial, exemplary artwork for Crary is J. M. W. Turner’s painting Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning After the Deluge (1843), which was influenced by Goethe's writings on physiological optics. Crary sees this painting as symptomatic of the broader nineteenth century visual regime because he sees it as showing a complete collapse of “the older model of representation” based on the optics of the camera obscura.1 As he writes, the work, in which he sees the sun as representative of the eye, accords a “central” emphasis on “the retinal processes of vision; and it was the carnal embodiment of sight that the camera obscura denied or repressed”.2 Does Crary’s model of vision allow us to understand the central concerns of this painting and perhaps fiction after the invention of photography? 1 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 139. 2 Ibid. 7 Figure 1. J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843) Along with Crary, I share the idea that this painting shows what is central to understandings of vision in the nineteenth century, and that it makes evident the underpinnings of the visual regime at the time. However, what I see as central are not changes in scientific understandings of sight which influenced the construction of art. Rather, the themes shown in the painting that are absolutely central to the visual regime after the invention of photography are the figure of the author and the implicit invocation of the law and its reading. In the centre of the painting is Moses who, according to the Bible, received the tablets of the Law from God that were inscribed with God’s own writing; Moses as the first reader of God’s Law. In addition, Moses is writing – he is not just reader of the law, but also the author that is divinely inspired. Yet Crary’s understanding of the painting, reflected in his shortening of its title, does not address such related themes of authorship, the law and of its reading which I understand as absolutely crucial to understanding how nineteenth-century commentators represented themselves as seeing.