Victorian Fiction As Optical Technology a Dissertation
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO VIRTUAL REALISM: VICTORIAN FICTION AS OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY AMANDA SHUBERT CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Shubert All Rights Reserved For Peter TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………..v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………...…………………………………...vi ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….x Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Hocus Focus Chapter One...……………………………………………………………………………………32 Fictional Apparitions: Magic in Cranford Chapter Two...……………………………………………………………………………………72 Virtual Empire: Diamonds in The Moonstone Chapter Three...…………………………………………………………………………………116 Phantasmal History: Phantasmagoria in A Tale of Two Cities Chapter Four….…………………………………………………………………………………158 Persistence of Character: Moving Images in The Mayor of Casterbridge BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………196 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0.1. David Brewster’s Stereoscope…………………………………………………………3 Figure 1.1. Pepper’s Ghost……………………………………………………………………….46 Figure 1.2. Advertisement for Pepper’s Ghost at the Royal Polytechnic Institution……………...52 Figure 1.3. Single Lever Magic Lantern Slide of Ship Rocking in Moonlit Bay………………..70 Figure 2.1. The Sovereign’s Sceptre……………………………………………………………...79 Figure 2.2. View of a path in the grounds of a country house………………...…………………...81 Figure 2.3. Stanhope Viewer Containing “Reminiscences of Tunbridge Wells”…………………82 Figure 2.4. The Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light, in its Original Setting……………………….89 Figure 2.5. Queen Victoria……………………………...………………………………………102 Figure 3.1. Engraving of Robertson’s Phantasmagoria…………………………………………125 Figure 3.2. Figure of “Death”…………………………………………………………………...131 Figure 3.3. First Phase of “Woman’s Head Appears from Flower”………...…………………...149 Figure 3.4. Second Phase of “Woman’s Head Appears from Flower”…………………………..149 Figure 3.5. First Phase of “Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother”……………………………….149 Figure 3.6. Second Phase of “Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother”……………………………149 Figure 3.7. Detail from Panoramic Magic Lantern Slide…….………………………………….154 Figure 4.1. Phenakistoscope Disk Designed by Joseph Plateau…………………………………167 Figure 4.2. Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Praxinoscope Theatre…………………………………...173 Figure 4.3. Phenakistoscope Disk Depicting Woman Beating Man with Bat…...………………178 Figure 4.4. Phenakistoscope Disk Depicting Man and Spinning Top………….………………..183 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The years that I spent writing this dissertation have been filled with wrestling, wrangling, second-guessing, self-scrutinizing, but above all, with sweetness and joy. I am truly grateful to the community of mentors, colleagues and friends who challenged me to write at the furthest limits of my thought and created an environment in which I could have this much fun. I would like to thank my dissertation advisors, Elaine Hadley, Tom Gunning and Zachary Samalin, for their incredible mentorship. Elaine’s sheer brilliance as a scholar and thinker, generosity in imagining this project alongside me, and commitment to the everyday work of advising have been my guiding lights for the past three years. Tom’s extraordinary work on pre-cinema was the inspiration for this project. I am grateful to him for sharing with me his deep knowledge of virtual media. Zach pushed me to think more theoretically and expansively about the nineteenth century, encouraged my proclivities towards risk-taking and discipline-bending, and insisted that I trust my critical instincts. Working with these three scholars has been one of the great privileges of my life. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to thank the many other readers and interlocutors who helped this project take shape. The idea for the dissertation was hatched in Beth Helsinger’s graduate seminar on nineteenth-century history and fiction. I am grateful to Beth for her conviction that there was indeed a story to tell about realism and optical technology, and for encouraging me to be the one to tell it. For generously reading and discussing my work in progress, I would like to thank Frances Ferguson, Daniel Morgan, Jim Chandler, Alexis Chema, Edgar Garcia, Heather Keenleyside, Josephine McDonagh, Elaine Scarry, and the participants of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Atlantic Studies Workshop, Mass Culture Workshop and the Franke Institute for the Humanities Fellows Workshop. Conversations with Julie Orlemanski, Mary-Catherine Harrison, John Plunkett, Maud Ellman, and Lisa Ruddick helped to illuminate the stakes and vi contexts of the dissertation. My cohort at the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in 2016 gave me the confidence to leap into archival research and some tools to make sense of what I learned; thanks, in particular, to Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Sujit Thomas. I am grateful to Sarah Wenzel for her research support, especially with identifying archives and tracking down sources. Katie Nolan copy edited the manuscript with skill and care; her work was essential. My partner Peter McDonald read every page of this dissertation and made all of them better. His encouragement, provocations, editorial feedback and, above all, unwavering belief in me and my work, has sustained this project more than anything else. This bundle of pages is for him. I completed this dissertation on a fellowship at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, in a beautiful office with picture windows where I could watch the seasons change as my word count grew. I am indebted to the entire staff at the Franke for making my year here so warm, pleasant and easy. In earlier stages of my work, I was fortunate to be able to conduct archival research on optical technology in England. For the funding that allowed me to undertake this research, I must thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago. I am also grateful to the archives that allowed me to study their materials and the archivists who were so generous with their knowledge and patient with their time. In particular, I would like to thank Lewis Pollard at the National Science & Media Museum, Phil Whickham and Mike Rickard at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, and Joss Marsh and David Francis at the Kent Museum of the Moving Image. Additional thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Word & Image Center, V&A Museum of Childhood, National Art Library, University of Westminster Archive, and Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University. vii I am so proud of the righteous community of teachers, scholars and activists at and around the University of Chicago with whom I have worked, argued, laughed, organized, broken bread and made trouble for six years. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Nadia Chana, Alejandra Azuero, Nell Pach, Katerina Korola, Chaz Lee, Chloe Blackshear, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Carmen Merport, Katharine Mershon, Nicole Morse, Katie Nolan, Noa Merkin, Steven Maye, Arianna Gass, Kaneesha Parsard, Andres Millan, Cosette Bruhns, Megan Tusler, Abigail Marcus, Geronimo Sarmiento-Cruz, John Walsh and Ally Field for their friendship and solidarity. While writing our scholarship and teaching our courses, many of us have also been involved in labor, feminist and anti-racist organizing and diversity work, including winning a union for graduate students at the University of Chicago. Our commitment to holding each other up when the institution let us down has nourished me and kept the fire burning in my belly. Thank you, too, to my brilliant far-flung friends whose love and care has been essential, especially Alli Carlisle, Lise Bradford, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Martina McLennan, Josee Thauvette and Lora Hutchison. I am fortunate to have had so much support from my family as I navigated the joys and frustrations of research. Thank you to my mother, Rachelle Mingail Shubert, for her contagious enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and George Eliot which made me think, when I was applying to graduate school, that maybe I would give Victorian literature a try. My father Howard Shubert has inspired me with his meticulous research on architectural history and his love of images. When we were children and I would hold forth at the dinner table, my brother Ben would often roll his eyes in exasperation and ask, “Why don’t you just go write a book about it?” This was excellent advice, and I hope he will be pleased that I have taken it. The love and friendship of my grandmother, Pauline Shubert, who died just as I was putting the finishing touches on this dissertation, sustained me through the writing process in more ways than viii she could have known. Thanks, too, to Martha and Ray McDonald, who have enthusiastically cheered me on to the finish line—I am so lucky to have them in my life. Lastly, thank you to Prospero, my small and scruffy terrier, for always remembering to walk me during my long days of writing. He is a very good dog. ix ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the rich intersections between realist fiction and pre-cinematic optical technologies in Victorian Britain. Most scholars agree that the styles and techniques of literary realism are deeply shaped by visual culture, but they limit their inquiry to pictorial media like painting and photography. In “Virtual