Domestic Iconography
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DOMESTIC ICONOGRAPHY: A Cultural Study of Victorian Photography, 1840-1880 Charlotte Boman Submitted in Partial Fulfilment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English, Communication and Philosophy Cardiff University, 2017 For Tamas and Zoë i Acknowledgements I want to thank my supervisor Professor Julia Thomas for providing me with invaluable intellectual counsel, stimulus and resolve at every stage. Without her kind, steadfast, rigorous guidance (and great sense of humour) this thesis would not have been written. I would also like to express my gratitude to the AHRC for providing financial support for this research project and for other activities that have played a part in enriching the experience. ii SUMMARY This critical study of photography between 1840 and 1880 focuses on the medium’s complex role as a mediator of the ideology of domesticity in an era of intense industrialisation and far-reaching popularisation. In doing so, photographic production and consumption are located within the wide, hybrid framework of print and commodity culture, with particular emphasis placed on the patterns of communication emerging through the new network of family periodicals. This methodological approach serves in part to overcome the considerable difficulties of bringing amorphous voices vying for discursive control over photography into focus. More importantly, however, it is proposed that this journalistic field testifies to the conflicting appeal photography held for a domestic readership, and the intricacy of combining a family orientated agenda with the challenges presented by a modernising world. The turn towards a more divisive perspective on photography in the mid-1850s is fundamentally bound up with extraneous conditions, circumstances which shaped patterns of discourse, professional practices and ordinary usage: urbanisation, an enlarging consumer market, social and demographic change and evolving anxieties around identity, gender and domesticity in light of all these permutations. As indicated by articles, published correspondence, advertisements and publicity, photography responded to conflicting desires and impulses present in culture and society at large. Liminal by nature, the medium figures as a powerful symbol of domestic boundness but also as the embodiment of a swelling engagement with the metropolis, a site of hazard and iniquity, but also an advancing arena for bourgeois social performance and play. Thus, this study, like the Victorian photographer, traces the ideological construction of the Victorian family through multiple lenses comic, architectural, artistic, familial, institutional, topographical and social. iii Contents Acknowledgements / p. i Summary / p. ii Contents / p. iii List of Figures / p. iv Introduction From Street to Drawing Room: Victorian Social Life and Photography / p. 1 Chapter 1 Houses Made of Glass: Photography, Domesticity and the Mid-Victorian Family Periodical / p. 24 Chapter 2 Visualising the Reader: Portraiture, Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Sense of Self / p. 128 Chapter 3 At Home in the City: Photography and Urbanisation / p. 236 Coda / p. 362 Bibliography / p. 373 iv List of Figures Figure 1 [Taylor] ‘Busy Street Scene at Oxford Circus. Regent Circus Displayed on Front of Building’, 3 October 1873 © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection / page 15 Figure 2 Exterior of a Photographic Studio, advertisement (detail), ca. 1860. Reproduced with permission of The John Hannavy Picture Collection / page 34 Figure 3 Interior of a Photographic Studio, advertisement (detail), ca. 1864. Reproduced with permission of Local Studies, Swindon Libraries / page 40 Figure 4 ‘A Photographic Positive’, Punch 25, 30 July 1853, p. 48. Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 51 Figure 5 ‘Art v. Nature’, Punch 48, 4 March 1865, p. 88. Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 82 Figure 6 London Stereoscopic Company, advertisement (detail), National Magazine 1, January 1857, p. 18. Reproduced from an image produced by ProQuest LLC. / page 90 Figure 7 ‘Our friend Mr. Blobbins’s stereoscopic studies are suddenly assisted by two young friends, who oblige him with an illustration of “differing angles”’, Punch 65, 16 April 1859, p. 152. Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 94 Figure 8 Parkins & Gotto, advertisement, All the Year Round 13, 27 May 1865, p. 8. Reproduced from an image produced by ProQuest LLC. / page 98 Figure 9 v Parkins & Gotto, advertisement, All the Year Round 5, 25 May 1861, p. 6. Reproduced from an image produced by ProQuest LLC. / page 103 Figure 10 Parkins & Gotto, advertisement, All the Year Round 5, 31 August 1861, p. 558. Reproduced from an image produced by ProQuest LLC. / page 103 Figure 11 [Richard Doyle] ‘There is no Place Like Home’, Punch’s Almanack 16, 1849 (n. p.). Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 113 Figure 12 ‘Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; Or, Murder Made Familiar’, Punch 17, 22 September 1849, p. 116. Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 115 Figure 13 Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858 © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science and Society Picture Library / page 138 Figure 14 Henry Fox Talbot, A Scene in a Library, 1844 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / page 144 Figure 15 Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day’s Work is Done, 1877 © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science and Society Picture Library / page 156 Figure 16 J. J. E. Mayall, ‘Group taken at Windsor Castle on 9th March 1863’. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 / page 160 Figure 17 J. J. E. Mayall, ‘Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’, 1860 © National Portrait Gallery, London / page 163 vi Figure 18 J. J. E. Mayall, ‘Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’, 1860 © National Portrait Gallery, London / page 163 Figure 19 J. J. E. Mayall, ‘Queen Victoria’, 1860. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 / page 165 Figure 20 R. H. Mason, ‘Charles Dickens; Mamie Dickens; Kate Macready (‘Katey’) Perugini (née Dickens)’, 1865 © National Portrait Gallery, London / page 167 Figure 21 Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Drat the EastWind, ca. 1857 © Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science and Picture Library / page 173 Figure 22 ‘Tichborne v. Mudie’s! A Bad Look-Out for the Circulating Libraries’, Punch 61, 25 November 1871, p. 220. Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 176 Figure 23 ‘Miss Sharp in her Schoolroom’, from William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. A Novel without a Hero (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848, (facing) p. 80 / page 180 Figure 24 Lady Hawarden, ‘Photograph’, ca. 1861 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / page 190 Figure 25 Lady Hawarden, ‘Photograph’, ca. 1861 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / page 190 Figure 26 Lady Hawarden, ‘Photograph’, ca. 1862-1863 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / page 192 Figure 27 vii Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Girl with Dove, ca. 1860. Courtesy of George Eastman Museum / page 196 Figure 28 Charles Nègre, ‘Scène de Marché au Port de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris (before February 1851)’. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington / page 205 Figure 29 William Edward Kilburn, ‘The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common’, 10 April 1848. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 / page 208 Figure 30 Arthur Boyd Houghton, Holborn in 1861. Reproduced in Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 51 / page 218 Figure 31 Henry Dixon, ‘Holborn Viaduct’, 1869 © London Metropolitan Archives, City of London / page 221 Figure 32 Henry Dixon, ‘Holborn Viaduct’, 1869 © London Metropolitan Archives, City of London / page 223 Figure 33 Arthur Boyd Houghton, ‘Facing the Camera’, ca. 1865 © Tate, London / page 225 Figure 34 [Anon.] ‘Photographic Saloon, East End of London [From a Sketch]’, from London Labour and the London Poor (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 4 vols., vol. 3, (facing) p. 207 © British Library / page 227 Figure 35 John Thomson, Photography on the Common, 1877 © John Thomson / Museum of London / page 230 Figure 36 [Anon.] ‘Road Repairers near London Bridge Station’, ca. 1860. Courtesy of Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin viii / page 237 Figure 37 [Anon.] ‘Woman trying to get on a horse bus’, ca. 1850-1880 © TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection / page 239 Figure 38 [Anon.] ‘London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company Co, Ltd.’, ca. 1867. Courtesy of Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin / page 245 Figure 39 Valentine Blanchard, ‘Temple Bar, Fleet Street / Strand’, ca. 1862 © Valentine Blanchard / Museum of London / page 250 Figure 40 Alfred Silvester, Full Stop, ca. 1850-1860 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / page 256 Figure 41 Alfred Silvester, National Sports. The Rail! The Road!! The Turf!!! The Settling Day!!!!, ca. 1865. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles / page 258 Figure 42 Edward Anthony, ‘Broadway, New York, in the Rain’, ca. 1860 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / page 262 Figure 43 ‘The New Glasgow Waterworks Opened by Her Majesty on the 14th Inst. Outlet of Loch Katrine From a Photograph by Thomas Annan, Hope-Street, Glasgow’, Illustrated London News, 15 October 1859 (front page). Reproduced with permission of Cardiff University Library / page 274 Figure