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Facing the camera: Dickens, photography, and the anxiety of representation

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Facing the camera: Dickens, photography, and the anxiety of representation

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Content FACING THE CAMERA:
DICKENS, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE ANXIETY OF REPRESENTATION
Copyright 2001
by
Melissa Sue Kort
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2001
Melissa Sue Kort
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UMI Number; 3027735
Copyright 2001 by
Kort, Melissa Sue
All rights reserved.
UMI
UMI Microform 3027735
Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company.
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
M e li s s a_ ^ Sue _ K o r t ............... ..............................
under the direction of h.&t Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date .... M ay.iL.. 2 . 9 Q I
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
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Melissa Sue Kort James R. Kincaid
ABSTRACT
FACING THE CAMERA: DICKENS, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE ANXIETY
OF REPRESENTATION
Charles Dickens’s career grew alongside the development of
photography as technology, art, and commodity. This dissertation reads
Dickens’s novels against photography, exposing an anxiety of representation
— a cluster of fears, dilemmas, and concerns about seeing/being seen.
The development of the fixed photograph was announced two years
after Oliver Twist fust appeared. My first chapter examines how Dickens
predicts photography in Oliver, a work highly self-conscious not only of its
own representational processes, but of other media. In it, Dickens privileges
the flexibility of language over the fixity of images.
Chapter 2 explores how photographed portraits present the reader
with the visual construction of “Dickens” as genius, gentleman, and
commodity. He avoids revealing in them his deeper, private self while
creating and consolidating a conventionalized public persona.
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2
Chapter 3 turns to Bleak House, published the year the Great
Exhibition brought photography full recognition. Although the novel avoids
direct reference to photography, a photographic sensibility fills its pages. The
camera, which temporarily masks the instability of perception, provides a
perfect model for understanding Dickens’s complex narrative strategies,
revealing how all seeing is in some way dictated, and in particular shaped by
the prevailing ideology.
Chapter 4 examines how Dickens tries to sidestep photographic proof
in Great Expectations. However, the missing photograph mentioned on its
first page raises issues of narrative strategies, identity, and evidence (issues
shared with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White), which reside inside a
geography that can be approached, and at least roughly charted, by applying
modem theories of photography to the novel.
In the nineteenth century, and beyond, Dickens influenced not only
how poverty was described, but how it could be seen. Chapter 5 traces the
effect of Dickens, particularly his Sketches by Boz, on two photographic
documentaries, John Thomson and Adolphe Smith’s 1877 Street Life in
London and Jacob Riis’s 1890 How the Other Half Lives. The Dickensian
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model for documenting the poor, which blends documentary and fiction,
“realism” and sympathy, goes largely unchallenged until the rise of
Modernism, as in the work of Walker Evans.
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To the memory of my mother,
Shirley J. Kort
whose smile is always before me
and
to the future of my son,
Isaac P a trick Kort-Meade
just because
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iii
Acknowledgements
The story of every dissertation, I assume, is a saga of some sort.
Mine tells of an extended journey, sometimes arduous and often side
tracked. Along the way, many people have helped me and deserve my
gratitude, including librarians, computer techs, my son’s daycare providers
and the virtual community of VICTORIA. Those I name here have meant the
most to me.
First, and foremost, thanks go to my family. My sister and fellow
writer, Michele Kort, provided a superior support system. My father, Norman
Kort, always encouraged me to finish what I started. My husband, Tom
Meade, offered tea, neck rubs, and patient love. My son, Isaac, brought me
much joy and provided always welcomed distractions. I have been blessed
by good friends, like Jody (Helft) Moss, who I knew always believed I would
do this. Sadly, two are no longer alive to celebrate these fruits of their
friendship: Pat Pacheco kept me thinking and advised me to go back to
graduate school, and Elizabeth Carlson shared her precious time and great
insights to get me back on track when I most needed it.
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I am deeply grateful to my students at Santa Rosa Junior College,
past and present, who let me try out my ideas on them, and who kept my feet
firmly on the ground. I am especially indebted to Leslie Pederson for
teaching me back down the final stretch.
Much credit goes to my dissertation advisor, Jim Kincaid, whose own
writing kept me laughing and whose encouragement kept me going.
Most importantly, this work would not have been possible without my
mother, who, by example and in spirit, showed me how to get lost in books.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements page iii
List of figures..................................................... vi
Introduction: Taming the Photograph...................................................... 1
“The Machine for Taking Likenesses”:
Photographing Oliver Twist.. .......................................... 12
Picturing Dickens.................... 60
Telling Shadows: Photographic Sensibility in Bleak House ......95
The Case of the Missing Photograph: Great Expectations...............150
Street Life: From Boz to Photo Documentary ........................... 199
Bibliography......................................................... 240
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vi
List of Figures
Herbert Watkins: Charles Dickens (1861).................... page 9
George Cruikshank: Fagin in the condemned Ceil ....................................49
Daguerreotype by Henri Claudet (around 1850) ........................... 62
Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Clementina and Isabella Grace Maude
(c. 1863-4)............................................................... 67
Julia Margaret Cameron: Alfred Tennyson (1865) .....................69
Julia Margaret Cameron: J.F.W. Herschel (1867)....... 70
The Gurney photograph (1867)...................................................... 76
Herbert Watkins: Dickens reading at St. Martin's Hall (1859)......................... 81
Fradelle & Young: Charles Dickens (date unknown) ..............82
R.H. Mason: Dickens reading to Mamey and Kate (1865)..............................83
R.H. Mason: Dickens, Mamey and Kate (1865)............................................... 83
Lewis Carroll: George MacDonald, with his eldest daughter, Lily (1863)..... 84
Lewis Carroll: Mr. and Mrs. Millais with their two daughters (1865)..............86
Hablot K. Browne: Morning.................................................... 141
Augustus Leopold Egg: Past and Present /// (1858)..................... 142
Felix Nadar: The Artist's Mother (or Wife) (1890)............................ 156
H. P. Robinson: Fading Aw ay ................................. .................................... 169
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Lewis Carroll: Alice Liddell as Beggar Girl....................................................208
John Thomson: London Boardmen.................................................................210
John Thomson: The “Crawlers”......................... 213
John Thomson: London Cabmen......................................................217
George Cruikshank: The Last Cab-Driver.. ....................................217
John Thomson: “Hookey Alt,” of Whitechapel.. ...................................... 219
Jacob Riis: In the Home of an Italian Rag Picker, Jersey Street................. 229
Jacob Riis: "Knee-Pants" at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen — A Ludlow Street
Sweater's Shop ......................................................... 230
Walker Evans: License Photo Studio, New York (1934)...................... ....... 234
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1
Introduction
Taming the Photograph
Photography has become almost invisible in our age of photo ops and
Polaroids, of one hour labs and throwaway cameras. Our homes are littered
with pictures: framed photos clutter our shelves and refrigerators, awkwardly
posed portraits chronicle our school years, and snapshots attest to our
voyages and arrivals, our ceremonies and milestones. Surrounded by a
plethora of images, we've grown all but immune to the camera. It took the
paparazzi who chased Princess Diana’s car before its fatal crash to remind
us — for a while — of photography’s dangerously invasive glare.
Despite our surface complacency, like the Victorians who at
photography’s inception quickly absorbed it into their cultural fabric, we find
ourselves still strangely discomforted by the form. Computer technology has
brought about a second revolution of vision, a shift away from the mimetic
promise of photography which rattled the nineteenth century’s notions of
representation towards “ fabricated visual ‘spaces’ ... relocating vision to a
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2
plane severed from a human observer” (Crary 1). While we applaud the
wonders of digital imagery— a newborn’s mug shot can be downloaded and
seconds later viewed by doting grandparents a continent or two away — we
also recoil in alarm. Films like Forrest Gump (1994) and In the Line of Fire
(1993) which employ computer wizardry to doctor documentary footage so
that their central characters appear in historic moments, force us to question
the accuracy of all photographs. Did the young Bill Clinton really shake
JFK’s hand? Did Neal Armstrong really walk on the moon?
How can we “tame the Photograph ... [and] temper the madness
which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it”
(Barthes 117)? At the end of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests two
strategies: “ to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or
to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality” (119). When photography
was new, when its power was developing swiftly, when the way of seeing it
offered overtook other models, crumbled social barriers, threatened privacy
and offered damning proof, Charles Dickens employed both tactics, writing in
ways intended, whether consciously or not, to housebreak the beast, to
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lessen its power. Dickens, who easily epitomizes the Victorians’ fascination
with the visual, attempted to reclaim narrative from photographs, which,
despite their apparent stillness, demand to be retold, and thus reconstituted
in time.1 Reading his novels against photography exposes an anxiety of
representation — a cluster of fears, dilemmas, and concerns about
seeing/being seen — in Dickens’s writing. In its mechanical accuracy,
photography threatened to curb or stifle imaginative representations.
Realism turned from the inconstant mirror to the precision of the camera. But
rather than confirming vision and codifying identity, photography instead
revealed the constructiveness of self and the abyss which lay between self-
image and appearance. Lighting and exposure, pose and costume, angle
1 This issue was at the center of “Snapshots,” a show at the San Francisco Museum of
Modem Art in 1998. Titles and captions were set off to the side of large clusters of
photographs: self-conscious artists’ productions intermixed with shoebox and kitchen
drawer finds. Some titles were written by the photographers, many added by the curator.
Because of the difficulty of connecting pictures to their labels, viewers were left to read the
pictures against/with the others with which they were displayed, to construct a narrative out
of the museum context itself. Why were these images chosen? Why was this one placed
next to that one? Why are we supposed to take these seriously? Without other guidance,
besides basic material clues to chronology (clothes, cars), viewers couldn’t help but relate
the images to our own snapshot experiences, as photographer, object, and collector: these
could well have been our mothers, our uncles, our dogs.
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and artistic license — the apparatus of photography reconstructed how we
understood not only ourselves but how others see us. Isek Dinesen tells us,
“Princess Caroline [of Denmark]... had had her portrait painted many times
in her life — but when she was given the first daguerreotype of herself she
looked at it silently for a long time and then said, ‘Well, I am ver-ry thankful
that my friends have stood by me’” (17).
Seeing is always predicated on the viewer’s desires, and on prevailing
ideologies. Photography, while posing a model of neutral observation, proves
that such neutrality is impossible, even for a machine.
Dickens reflected the fears that haunted his age, fears concerning
perception, identity, and mechanical reproduction. What is reality, exactly?
How can we know it, and confirm that our knowledge is right? Who are we,
and how do others perceive us? How do we want to be seen/known? How
do we understand others, especially those who are Other than us? What is
lost, what gained in the endless duplication of images? These questions
arise about both photography and narration, but they can only be answered
in narrative.
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While Dickens adroitly sidesteps directly discussing photography in his
novels, he certainly could not fail to participate in the photographic culture
which surrounded him. Dickens the observer roamed the streets of London,
where shops windows of every sort displayed photographs — often of
Dickens himself. How could he help but be influenced? Similarly, one might
resist owning a computer today, but be unable to escape the impact of our
wired culture, in the images we see in public, the music we hear, the means
by which our daily business is conducted, the ways we represent the world.
“Interface” becomes a common verb; hypertext logic dramatically shapes a
wide range of narratives, from MTV videos to fine literature.
But Dickens goes beyond awareness and influence, turning a
photographic sensibility to his advantage. The camera obscures the
subjectivity of all narrative, camouflaging stolen glances which capture the
appearances of subjects who are often caught unaware. Seemingly
grounded in “ facts, facts, facts,” photography can contort those facts while
simultaneously asserting their validity. If photographs are to be seen as
evidence of anything, they are, Annette Kuhn reminds us,
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... material for interpretation - evidence in that sense; to
be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left
behind at the scene of a crime. Evidence of this sort,
though, can conceal, even as it proports to reveal, what
it is evidence of. A photograph can certainly throw you
off the scent. (18)
In addition, photography emphasizes the contrast between movement and
stasis. Dickens’s effort to stop narrative time, to contemplate the meaning of
a moment, in part suits his desire, shared with many of his contemporaries,
to preserve some of the values of the past from the impact of rampant
change. To Dickens, the past is open to re-vision.
In the face of our own visual future, full of the usual great expectations
as well as trepidation, it is particularly timely to consider Dickens’s
uneasiness in relation to photographs and the interplay of narrative and
photograph. Shifts in the fields of art history and the history of photography
over the last two decades give this work added dimension. Beginning in the
1980s, critics like Svetlana Alpers, Norman Bryson, Michael Fried, and Meike
Bal have reexamined the relations between the “ sister arts,” poetry
(literature) and painting (visual arts). Relying heavily on critical theory, they
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7
discuss the “ word-image opposition” (Bal), visual poetics, “discursivity”
versus “ figurality” (Bryson), description versus narration (Alpers). Key to their
arguments is the dynamic intersection of visuality and narrativity. Narrativity
gives the still image motion; visuality compels the moving narrative to hold
still. “Narrativity is generally considered an aspect of verbal art, which can be
mobilized in visual art under great representational pressure only,” Bal writes,
but she hesitates to allow visuality to play the same role in narrative:
“Something comparable is alleged for visual imagery, which literature strives
for but can never completely realize” (4). Dickens challenges this
assumption, exerting his visualizing power while de-mobilizing narrative to
invite the lingering look.
Concurrent with the changes in art history, photography has
undergone a reassessment, and what Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes about
postmodern photographers has implications about the study of photography’s
history as well.
Virtually every critical and theoretical issue with which
postmodernist art may be said to engage in one sense
or another can be located within photography. Issues
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having to do with authorship, subjectivity, and
uniqueness are built into the very nature of the
photographic process itself: issues devolving on the
simulacrum, the stereotype, and the social and sexual
positioning of the viewing subject are central to the
production and function of advertising and other mass-
media forms of photography. (115)
Significantly, most of these issues also arise in response to Dickens’s novels.
In the five chapters which follow, I examine the relationship between
Dickens and photography by answering three sets of questions. First, how
do photographs appear in Dickens’s novels — or why don’t they? More
broadly, how does reading the novels against the developing form renew our
understandings of them? Oliver Twist privileges the flexibility of language
over the fixity of images, but many of the visualizing techniques Dickens
employs in it predict photography, about to burst on the cultural scene. In
Bleak House, which appeared the year the Great Exhibition confirmed
photography’s mass appeal, the camera provides a model for understanding
Dickens’s complex narrative strategies, which depend on changing ideas of
vision. Great Expectations attempts to position itself outside of photographic
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culture, yet invites the application of modern theories of photography to re
read its discussion of identity, evidence, and narrative form.
Second, how did Dickens’s writings influence the ways in which their
subjects — particularly the urban poor — get recorded in photographs?
What influence has fiction had on documentary photography? Is the
powerful record promised by photography already compromised at its
inception, its bias pre-determined?
Third, what about Dickens
as the subject of photographs?
Frequently photographed, Dickens
participated in the growth of the
cult of the celebrity. For whose
eyes is he performing? What do
we see when he looks back at us?
Figure 1 Herbert Watkins: Charles
Our present attitude toward Dickens (1861)
photography is often fraught with the same anxiety Dickens’s work suggests.
But even though we accept that what photographs offer us is not to be
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10
trusted, we still want to believe in them. Jocelyn Moorhouse explores this
concern in her 1991 film, Proof, in which the central figure, a blind man, takes
photographs, seeking proof of a world he cannot verify for himself by sight
alone. Most importantly, we eventually learn, he desires a photograph of his
mother which would attest to her death, because he fears she has not died
but deserted him. Photographs seem to offer the possibility of confirmation
and closure. But the photographer requires the help of others to “see,” to
describe the pictures to him, and the assistants he selects have their own
needs and desires to fulfill. This leaves him dangerously exposed. When he
captures a friend’s betrayal on film, the friend further deceives him by not
describing the incriminating evidence in the photograph. Because they
demand narration, the silent photographs, rather than offering proof, collude
in the production and confirmation of lies.
Can we tame the Photograph? Do we really want to? When we try to
speak for photographs, they squirm out of our embrace. And well they
should. As Dickens intuitively understood, it is in the interstices between
photography and narrative that the real story can be found.
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1 1
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1992.
Dinesen, Isak. Daguerreotypes and Other Essays. Trans. P.M. Mitchell and
W.D. Paden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perfs. Tom Hanks, Robin Wright,
Gary Sinise, Sally Field. Paramount Pictures, 1994.
In the Line of Fire. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Perfs. Clint Eastwood, John
Malkovich, Rene Russo. Sony Pictures Entertainment, 1993.
Kuhn, Annette. “Remembrance.” Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, eds.
Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photograph. London:
Virago Press, 1991. 17-25.
Proof. Dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse. Perfs. Hugo Weaving, Genevieve Picot,
Russell Crowe. Fine Line Features, 1991.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
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“The Machine for Taking Likenesses”:
Photographing Oliver Twist
Critics and theorists have long been engaged in discussing Charles
Dickens’s novels in relationship to motion pictures. The interest in film arises
from two quarters. First, numerous film productions have been made from
the novels and stories, tracing back to the silent cinema.1 Hollywood’s
attraction to Dickens is easy to understand: the novels are full of plots,
intrigue, melodrama, strongly drawn characters and humorous caricatures.
In addition, they offer, by virtue of Dickens’s reputation as a classic literary
figure, a chance for the films to attain prestige by association. The reverse
also holds true: associating the novels with films gives them more currency
for resistant readers
Second, and perhaps of more interest to critics, Dickens’s narrative
strategies serve as an early vehicle for exploring film theory, most notably in
Sergei Eisenstein’s essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” (1944).
1 The Internet Movie Database lists 115 film and television adaptations, dating back to 1897.
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Eisenstein relishes having found a literary source from which to trace his
notions of film montage: “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of
parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel action by - Dickens!...
Dickens’s nearness to the characteristics of cinema in method, style, and
especially in viewpoint and exposition, is indeed amazing” (205, 206).2 Along
the way, Eisenstein clearly hopes to gain the same result as the film
producers, borrowing credibility for his work.
Let Dickens and the whole ancestral array, going back
as far as the Greeks and Shakespeare, be superfluous
reminders that both Griffith and our cinema prove our
origins to be not solely as of Edison and his fellow
inventors, but as based on an enormous cultured past;
each part of this past in its own moment of world history
has moved forward the great art of cinematography.
(232-3)
For Eisenstein, the connection between Griffith and Dickens operates on
three levels essential to his aesthetic and political project: “mass success,”
emotional stimulation, and moral conviction.
What were the novels of Dickens for his contemporaries,
for his readers? There is one answer: they bore the
2 Montage refers to associative (as opposed to continuity) editing, in which images or
sequences are combined so that “an idea ... arises from the collision of independent shots
— shots even opposite to one another: the ‘dramatic’ principle” (Eisenstein, Dialectic 49).
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same relation to them that the film bears to the same
strata in our time. They compelled the reader to live with
the same passions. They appealed to the same good
and sentimental elements as does the film (at least on
the surface); they alike shudder before vice, they alike
mill the extraordinary, the unusual, the fantastic, from
boring, prosaic and everyday existence. And they clothe
this common and prosaic existence in their special
vision. (206)
The ability of that vision to move its audience, Eisenstein argues, facilitates
the social project of Dickens’s novels, as well as of film.
Eisenstein claims that “ Just because it never occurred to his
biographers to connect Dickens with the cinema, they provide us with
unusually objective evidence, directly linking the importance of Dickens’s
observation with our medium [film]’’ (209). Here, it is easy to take issue with
Eisenstein’s conclusion, particularly his leap over photography— the visual
technology which Dickens did know and biographers do mention — to
cinema. The biographers he quotes -Stephen Zweig {Balzac, Dickens,
Dostoyevsky, 1930) and T. A. Jackson {Charles Dickens: The Progress of a
Radical, 1938), themselves situated in a film culture, might naturally
associate the visual elements of Dickens’s writing with the dominant visual
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15
form of their own time. In interpreting their descriptions, Eisenstein ignores
other forms to which they allude (including photography and theatre) in order
to make the cinematic connection. Zweig’s description, quoted by
Eisenstein, particularly points to photography, and not film: “[Dickens] never
overlooks anything; his memory and his keenness of perception are like a
good camera lens which, in the hundredth part of a second, fixes the least
expression, the slightest gesture, and yields a perfectly precise negative”
(qtd. in Eisenstein 210).
In order to make his argument about Dickens’s style being cinematic,
Eisenstein repeatedly asserts that “ The visual images of Dickens are
inseparable from aural images ...his descriptions offer not only absolute
accuracy of detail, but also an absolutely accurate drawing of the behavior
and actions of his characters” (211). The writing shows “ This austere
accumulation [of detail] and quickening tempo, this gradual play of light”
(216). Eisenstein refers to several of Dickens’s works, including The Cricket
on the Hearth, Dombey and Son, Hard Times, David Copperfield and A Tale
of Two Cities, but he offers an extended analysis of passages in Oliver Twist.
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Certainly, Dickens’s descriptions in Twist show abundant detail and
momentum; he takes into consideration not only the eye but the ear (and
often other senses); but are they “accurate? Take, for instance, this
example, when the crowd is chasing Oliver:
“Stop thief! Stop thief!” There is a magic in the sound.
The tradesman leaves his counter; and the carman his
waggon; the butcher throws down his tray; the baker his
basket; the milk-man his pail; the errand-boy his
parcels, the schoolboy his marbles; the paviour his pick
axe; the child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell,
helter-skelter, slap-dash; tearing, yelling, and
screaming; knocking down the passengers as they turn
the corners: rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the
fowls; and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo the
sound. (60-61)
The scene is clearly over-determined, from the too-long litany of street
characters, to the multiple sets of triplets (“pell-mell, helter-skelter, slap-dash;
tearing, yelling, and screaming”). As the list becomes excessive, the reader
senses the author’s teasing, dangling, manipulation. The over-accumulation
of specific details leads to generalizations in the next paragraph: “ The cry is
taken up by a hundred voices ... a whole audience desert Punch.” By the
third paragraph, the description returns to the specific, from “One wretched
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17
breathless child, panting with exhaustion,” to an again sympathetic narrator,
begging, “ Ay, stop him for God’s sake, were it only in mercy!” Arguably the
scene reads like a film sequence, with quick cuts between close-ups of
conventionally costumed extras, to long shots of the crowd, to close-ups of
the pathetic boy. But the description can hardly be called “accurate”; the
roving eye here is far too orchestrated. The scene is anti-realistic, taking full
advantage of the flexibility of language over the fixity of images.
This privileging of language contributes to the anxiety of
representation present in Oliver Twist, an anxiety which takes on additional
weight when placed in the context of the soon-to-be-announced new
photographic processes. The novel’s first installment appeared in February
1837, two years before Frenchman Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre3 and
Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot almost simultaneously made public the
3 Daguerre, already well known in London for his 1823 Diorama, “a picture show with
changing lighting effects which aroused astonishment and admiration by its perfect illusion of
reality” (Gemsheim 122), chose to patent his photographic process in London, probably
because “inventions had a much better chance of commercial exploitation [in England] than
anywhere else" (Gemsheim 122). Thus London became the heart of the new photographic
world, and the argument over who should be recognized as the inventor of the photograph
was waged in journals there, including the London Literary Gazette.
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two earliest fixed photographic methods: the daguerreotype and the calotype.
In England, Thomas Wedgwood, scion of the British pottery family, had been
making impermanent “sun prints” since sometime shortly before 1800; in
France, Joseph Nicephore Niepce had succeeded in fixing the camera’s
image around 1817 (Newhall 13). How much Dickens knew of these early
experiments as he wrote Oliver Twist is unclear, though he must have been
aware of some developments, since he has Mrs. Bedwin declare, “ The man
that invented the machine for taking likenesses might have known that would
never succeed; it’s a deal too honest” (71). In a novel highly self-conscious
of its own representational processes and the form’s status in relationship to
other medium, including theatre4 and painting,5 Mrs. Bedwin’s comment
invites explicit reference to photography, exposing Dickens’s interest in both
the still image and the fluctuating individual observer. While it may be correct
4 Meisel notes that Oliver Twist began generating dramatic versions in Spring 1838, when
only about half the novel had appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany (252 ft).
5 Dickens 1841 Preface to the Third Edition attempts to justify his obsession with depicting
“miserable reality.” In the Preface, Dickens repeatedly associates writing with painting and
the readers’ task as one of looking.
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for Eisenstein to show that Dickens’s novel suggests film narratives, the
visualizing techniques which he employs clearly predict photography.
Arresting Narrative______________
In the opening of Chapter XVII of Oliver Twist, Dickens writes what
Eisenstein calls his “own ‘treatise’ on the principles of this montage
construction of the story which he carries out so fascinatingly, and which
passed into the style of Griffith” (223). The narrator steps outside the action
to tell the reader, “It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous
melodramas, to present the tragic and comic scenes, in as regular
alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky well-cured
bacon” (102). For Dickens, the intent of such “ sudden shiftings of the scene,
and rapid changes of time and place,” besides being “sanctioned in books by
long usage ... [and] by many considered as the great art of authorship,” is to
mirror “real life,” in which we fail to notice them because “ we are busy actors,
instead of passive lookers-on, which makes a great difference” (emphasis
mine). Only through representation (here, defined as mimesis) can “we”
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move toward analysis of “real life.” Direct perception does not lead to
understanding; the mechanism of book or stage must intercede. Of course,
Dickens’s “lookers-on” are not left a merely “passive” role. As the “Stop!
Thief!” scene proves, he intends to arouse their engagement in the action.
Passivity merely suggests a still position outside the action from which the
reader/observer can watch and interpret. More importantly, it creates a
distance from which to acquire the understanding about how to judge what is
being shown.
In Oliver Twist, the chief “passive looker-on" is Oliver himself. While
the reader sees much of the story specifically through his eyes (as if through
a camera lens?), he himself seems incapable of immediately understanding
what he sees. Usually over-stimulated, underfed and exhausted, Oliver’s
most common response is to faint, feign sleep, or stand in stupefied
befuddlement. The reader, as a consequence, is asked, at times quite
specifically, to see for him, to imagine what Oliver can (or should) see from a
double perspective: first, knowing Oliver's innocence and his inability to
make much sense of his surroundings; second, applying the reader's own
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experience and morality, upon which Dickens depends. This is made clear
by the sequence which forces Oliver's flight, when he observes the picking of
Brownlow's pocket:
What was Oliver's horror and alarm as he stood a few
paces off, looking on with his eyelids as wide open as
they would possibly go, to see the Dodger plunge his
hand into the old gentleman's pocket; and draw from
thence a handkerchief! (60)
The reader must ascertain "what was Oliver's horror" by acknowledging his
leap from innocence to experience. Of course, the reader has understood
what Oliver has not — that Fagin's games intend more than play — but
cannot be content with a smug "l-told-you-so" response; instead, by
emphasizing Oliver's instant understanding, Dickens registers the shock of
recognition. But even more than that, he calls upon the reader’s social
knowledge to construct the meaning of what Oliver sees, to shift from the
visual to visuality. Norman Bryson writes,
Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire
sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural
construct, and make visuality different from vision, the
notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina
and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen
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consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built
into the social arena. (90-91)
Oliver’s innocence makes visuality contingent upon the reader’s knowledge.
We bring what he sees into social focus, and are thus implicated in Dickens’s
dramatic as well as moral vision.
Dickens calls repeated attention to the momentary quality of Oliver's
realization: "In an instant the whole mystery of the handkerchiefs ... rushed
upon the boy's mind"; "This was all done in a minute's space. In the very
instant...." That frozen instant stands in important contrast to the movement
which surrounds it, in essence halting the narrative for a moment in which
meaning is imposed upon action. Here, both Oliver and the reader make an
important shift: from the flow of narrative to the freezing of time, what in
Dickens’s “ treatise” he terms from “busy actors” to “mere spectators.” The
theatrical metaphor takes on deeper meaning in relationship to the concept
of “realization.” Martin Meisel notes:
“Realization,” which had a precise technical sense when
applied to certain theatrical tableaux based on well-
known pictures, was in itself the most fascinating of
“effects” on the nineteenth-century stage, where it meant
both literal re-creation and translation into a more real,
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that is more vivid, visual, physically present medium. To
move from mind’s eye [a phrase that will resonate in
Oliver Twisf\ to body’s eye was realization, and to add a
third dimension to two was realization, as when words
became picture, or when picture became dramatic
tableau. Always in the theater the effect depended on
the apparent literalness and faithfulness of the
translation, as well as the material increment. (30)
In Oliver Twist, the change of status from "actor” to "spectator" compels a
closer examination — a second, and third, and fourth look — of the still
moment, allowing for, if not an objective, at least a somewhat distanced
interpretation.
The initiation of the pick-pocketing scene speaks directly to this point.
The robbery itself, that moment which causes Oliver to recognize part of
Fagin's intentions and his own associated guilt, and the pursuit which follows,
occur as a similar interruption to Brownlow's own engrossed reading. He
serves as a model for the reader Dickens wants to arouse. At the moment
he is robbed, Brownlow is deep in the charm of a book, transported from the
shop outside of which he stands to "his elbow-chair, in his own study."
It is very possible that he fancied himself there, indeed;
for it was plain, from his utter abstraction, that he saw
not the book-stall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in
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short, anything but the book itself; which he was reading
straight through; turning over the leaf when he got to the
bottom of a page; beginning at the top line of the next
one; and going regularly on, with the greatest interest
and eagerness. (60)
Brownlow is forced out of his complacency, as Dickens perhaps hoped to
shake his own readers; he is made to recognize that there exists a world
outside of his comfortable study, a world in which children starve and steal.
This occurs because of an interruption, but the awareness comes upon him
“in a moment” after Oliver has been exonerated, when Brownlow observes,
“Little Oliver Twist lay on his back on the pavement, with his shirt unbuttoned,
and his temples bathed with water; his face a deadly white; and a cold
tremble convulsing his whole frame” (67). Again, Dickens describes the
sudden recognition, a stoppage of the flow of time which leads to a changed
understanding. This arresting of narrative to register a visual image suggests
the process of photography, rather than the flow of film, and emphasizes the
artificiality of the text. As Susan Sontag writes, “The photographed world
stands in the same, essentially inaccurate relation to the real world as stills
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do to movies. Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed
forever. Photographs are" (81).
In explaining Dickens’s visual style, most critics have seen, like
Eisenstein, his images pieced together, in sequence, and therefore aligned
with film.6 Understanding them in terms of brief, blunt, nearly isolated
moments, more akin to photographs, exposes Dickens’s shock techniques,
and explains how, even functioning against movement, Dickens is able to call
upon our sense of the “unattractive and repulsive truth” (xxvii) of his social
project. For Dickens, the effect is one of photographic collage, not filmic
montage: separate images, edges touching, giving an impression — but only
an impression — of cohesiveness. In photographs, Sontag argues, “Reality
is summed up in an array of casual fragments — an endlessly alluring,
poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world” (80). Masked by a
plethora of details, reductiveness is an essential element of Dickens’s
narrative force.
6 Meisel’s argument stands out here, since in order to show the relationship of Dickens’s
style to film, he points out Dickens’s allusions to contemporary technologies: the diorama
and the moving panorama.
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Dream States___________________
By focusing on the montage-like elements he identifies in Dickens’s
novels, Eisenstein fails to consider how, in their repeated reference to dream
states, they suggest the film experience in another way. Suzanne Langer
describes “ the powerful illusion the film makes not of things going on, but of
the dimension in which they go on — a virtual creative imagination; for it
seems one’s own creation, direct visionary experience, a ‘dreamed reality’”
(202). This describes key moments in Oliver’s experiences, moments at
which the reader becomes engaged with him not merely through the
narrator’s commentary, but by seeing as Oliver sees.7
Two such moments stand out in the novel, when Oliver experiences
crucial waking dreams, introduced by telling narrative asides. On his first
morning in Fagin’s den,
Although Oliver had roused himself from sleep, he was
not thoroughly awake. There is a drowsy state, between
sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five
minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half
7 There are other “dreamlike” moments in the novel, seen from points of view of other
characters. For example, see Bayley (5Iff) for his discussion of the Maylie burglary and the
meeting of Nancy and Rose in this context.
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conscious of everything that is passing around you, than
you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and
your sense wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such
times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is
doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty
powers: its bounding from earth and spuming time and
space; when freed from the restraint of its corporeal
associate. (53-4)
Dickens moves from the third person “he” to the second person “you,” and
directly includes the reader. Later, he uses the inclusive term “a mortal”
which becomes “his” and eventually “Oliver”; thus, Oliver becomes our
stand-in, and we readers are then “ freed from the restraint” of our bodies to
experience the moment with him, as he observes Fagin examining his
treasures.
Oliver is indeed a “passive looker-on” here; he doesn’t understand
Fagin’s actions or comments; of the objects Fagin surveys from his hidden
trove, “ Oliver had no idea, even of their names” (54). He watches, as if at a
dull movie, an uninvolved spectator. The dream state filters his direct
engagement, serving as a narrative device for separating him from
comprehending or being tainted by the actions around him. Only when he in
turn is observed by Fagin, “only for an instant — for the briefest space of time
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that can possibly be conceived” (54), does Oliver become fully alert and
engaged in the action. His gaze is meaningless, purposeless; he is unable
to answer Fagin’s question, “ What do you watch me for?” (55, emphasis
mine). Here Dickens contrasts the innocent with the knowing look, the
distanced spectator with the engaged observer. In addition, Oliver displays
the difficulty of finding meaning in action without its being arrested for a
moment of recognition. While his dream approximates the film experience,
meaning resides in the still glance. The observation does seem external to
the viewer, as if mediated by a camera, but the impression which registers is
received in a flash, a frozen frame, rather than in moving images.
Oliver and Fagin exchange looks again in Chapter XXXIV; again
Oliver is sleepy and Fagin alert, but this time, a more experienced and
knowing Oliver understands somewhat the consequences of their mutual
recognition. Once more, Dickens interrupts the story to explain the peculiar
nature of the specific state of consciousness, implicating the reader in the
inclusive “us.”
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes,
which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the
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mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to
ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering
heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability
to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called
sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all
that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a
time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which
really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves
with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and
imagination become so strangely blended that it is
afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate
the two. It is an undoubted fact, that although our sense
of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping
thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us,
will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere
silent presence of some external object: which may not
have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of
whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.
(216)
Eisenstein insists on the aurality of the novels (after all, film is an audio-visual
medium), but Dickens here emphasizes the silence of vision. The details
with which Dickens renders the dream state suggest the role of the audience
in a film: “ the body prisoner” while the mind is free to observe “ the visionary
scenes that pass before us.” However, Oliver’s situation in the “little room ...
at the back of the house,” its one latticed window looking into a garden, just
as “ the first shades of twilight were beginning to settle upon the earth,”
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suggests a much earlier technology, the mechanism of the camera obscura
— light passing through a small hole into a dark room {camera) in which the
observer stood to watch an inverted image appear on the opposite wall.
Jonathan Crary argues that by the early 1600s, the camera obscura had
become "no longer one of many instruments or visual options but instead the
compulsory site from which vision [could] be conceived or represented" (38).
It represents a reconstituting of the notion of the observer, of
interiority/exteriority, of representation itself.8 Crary sees in the camera
obscura "a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign
individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off
from a public exterior world."
At the same time, another related and equally decisive
function of the camera was to sunder the act of seeing
from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealize
8 Note that the accuracy of the camera obscura was questioned elsewhere in literature on
the same grounds as Mrs. Bedwin’s “machine.” Gemsheim notes:
A passage in Tristram Shandy [1760] shows that it is not only in the days of
photography that complaints were made against camera portraits. Commenting
upon the ways of great historians Sterne writes: “One of these you will see drawing
a full-length character against the light; that’s illiberal, dishonest, and hard upon the
character of the man who sits. Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of
you in the camera; that is the most unfair of all, because there you are sure to be
represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes. (17)
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vision. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is
authenticated and legitimized by the camera obscura,
but the observer's physical and sensory experience is
supplanted by the relations between a mechanical
apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth. (40)
This shift predicts the function of the photographic camera.
In Oliver Twist, on the eve of photography’s revolutionary impact on
vision and representation, Dickens rejects “mechanical apparatus.” 9
However, given its emphasis on Oliver’s sudden recognition of Fagin and
Monks spying on him — “It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his
eyes” (217) — the scene can be read as alluding to photography. This
“snapshot” provides an image to which Oliver will return, “shuddering at the
very recollection of the old wretch’s countenance" (218), and which he will
carry with him (unlike the impermanent image of the camera obscura).
Dickens emphatically “ corporealizes” vision in Oliver’s frail body, substituting
the “mechanical apparatus” and “objective truth” with sentimental and
sentient subjectivity. While his alerted friends cannot find a trace of Fagin
and Monks, they “ seemed to feel satisfied of the accuracy of what he said”
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simply by watching Oliver’s “earnest face” as he spoke (218). Dickens thus
challenges the evolution of “disciplinary power,” as D.A. Miller describes its
equivalent in novels: “What matters is that the faceless gaze becomes an
ideal to the power of regulation” (24). In Oliver Twist, the face behind the
gaze is all-important: “ facts” are subject to interpretation, and “ truth” is
located in the vulnerable, individualized, subjective body, itself in turn subject
to interpretation and judgment.
Dickens’s use of dream states suggests Thomas Carlyle’s complaint
in “Signs of the Times” (1829): “[Mjen have lost their belief in the Invisible,
and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible....We enjoy, we see
nothing by direct vision; but only by reflection, and anatomical
dismemberment” (77,78-79). For Carlyle “direct vision” fosters a belief in the
“Invisible,” the spiritual domain. “ We” are trapped not only in a world robbed
of spirit, but a world which is only visible, mechanical, material, and thus
superficial and empty. Dreams allow Dickens to suggest an Invisible realm,
to bestow a spiritual and thus moral dimension to sight, and a fairy tale
9 The choice of the simple minded Mrs. Bedwin to register his distaste emphasizes Dickens’s
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quality to the novel. This seems well in keeping with Oliver Twist, which, for
all its gritty views of the under-belly of London life, shelters its protagonist,
who can miraculously retain the impenetrable innocence of his character,
untainted by the weight of the corrupted world around him, and fulfill, one
supposes, the dream of most Victorian Londoners. Through dream states,
and through the sudden recognitions to which they give rise, Dickens invites
the reader to piece together Oliver’s fragmentary impressions, to share in
constructing the narrative and thus be implicated in its moral conclusions.
“Truth is Unpleasant” 1 0__________
Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, credits the author with
“ The art of copying from nature as it really exists in the common walks.”
Such was his handling of the piece of solid, existing,
everyday life, which he made here the groundwork of his
wit and tenderness, that the book [Oliver Twisf\ which
did much to help out of the world the social evils it
refusal to place much value on “the machine for taking likenesses.”
1 0 Dickens's illustrator, Cruikshank, caricatured the first public photographic studio in his
1841 woodcut illustration of S. L. Blanchard's poem, "The New School of Portrait-painting":
"But Truth is unpleasant/To prince and to peasant." Ironically (appropriately, considering
Oliver Twist}, the subject sits on a structure which suggests both a throne and a gallows.
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portrayed will probably preserve longest the picture of
them as they then were. (I: 94)
Forster highlights the visual dimension of the novel, although in laying claims
to its realism he simultaneously identifies its artifice: “It is a series of pictures
from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly natural agencies.”
Forster echoes Dickens at the start of Chapter XVII, where he claims the
shifts from tragic to comic scenes are deemed “natural” because they
resemble the shifts in melodrama. Dickens’s “pictures” have far more to do
with theatre than nature; when the artist/author’s eye turns to “lower life,” little
can be seen “perfectly” (for example, the poor serve as the exotic “other,”
always seen through a screen of prejudice). In Oliver Twist, the narrator,
who claims the title of “historian” (102), performs more like a ringmaster or
conjurer. Reality provides only the tentative “ groundwork” for the
imagination. Forster clearly misunderstands Dickens’s strategy: to shun the
notion of exact representation (along with the devices which produce it) in
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favor of the “wit and tenderness” of the artist. “The machine for taking
likenesses,” as Mrs. Bedwin claims, is “a deal too honest.”1 1
Dickens prefers to emphasize representation decidedly un
mechanical, and often less than “honest.” He reveals his prejudice in his
1841 Preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist. “I saw no reason, when I
wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not
offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral, at least as well as its
froth and cream” (xxv). The metaphor is itself demeaning, showing little
sympathy for those of whom he writes (and perhaps also for the “ froth”). And
the apologetic “ so long as their speech did not offend the ear” gives credence
to Mrs. Bedwin’s belief that “painters [and authors!]1 2 always make ladies out
prettier than they are, or they wouldn’t get any custom” (71). Dickens was
1 1 In 1859, photographer Francis Frith wrote that photography is “too truthful" because "It
insists on giving us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth [the legal allusion is
apt!]. Now we want, in Art, the first and last of these conditions but we can dispense very
well with the middle term" (qtd. In Talbot n. pag.). Later, Henry Peach Robinson asserted,
“Photographers, doctors, and dentists have licenses to practise deception for the good of
their patients” (46).
1 2 The substitution of author for painter is very appropriate here, given Dickens’s own
analogies in the 1841 Preface. For example, “It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such
associates in crime as really to exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their
wretchedness,... would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed, and which
would be a service to society” (xxvi).
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certainly as concerned about his custom(ers) as much as, if not more than,
any artist.1 3 While he claims “I have no faith in the delicacy which cannot
bear to look upon them [Nancy, the Dodger, and their ilk],” he shamelessly
sentimentalizes them.
Mechanical reproduction threatens to displace the softening effects of
the portrait artist, as well as to steal control from the individual subject by
“ taking” the image, rather than “making” it.1 4 Coming as it does on the eve of
the announcement of photographic processes, Dickens’s anxiety over
unpleasant truths predicts what will become a widespread fear of the way in
which photography seems to rob or otherwise reduce the portrait's subject.1 5
The portrait to which Mrs. Bedwin refers is, unbeknownst to both her
and Oliver, of Oliver’s mother, Agnes, painted by his father, Edward Leeford.
1 3 Musselwhite traces the transformation “from the nomadic buzz of Boz to the labeled
identity of Dickens....the reduction of a brilliant talent for display to the marketable status of a
commodity” (165).
1 4 “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces
of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire" (Sontag 4).
1 5 Note Elizabeth Hollander's description: "a photographer literally takes her [the model's]
image, then makes it into his picture by a different process.. . . [B]ecause the model is also
a person doing something, because she is both author and occupant of her pose, the nature
of that function entails a more complex and more concrete story" (134). Dickens begins to
sense the presence of that story in Dombey and Son.
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While a likeness created by a machine might be "too honest,” perhaps
attesting to her fallen status,1 6 the painted portrait remains open for
interpretation. Oliver is immediately caught up in its effect: “ the eyes look so
sorrowful; and where I sit, they seem fixed upon me. it makes my heart beat
... as if it was alive, and wanted to speak to me, but couldn’t” (71). The
painting has the power to stimulate the imagination.
When later he faces away from the portrait, Oliver "did see it in his
mind's eye as distinctly as if he had not altered his position." Surprisingly, at
this point, he acts dishonestly: "he thought it better not to worry the kind old
lady, so he smiled gently when she looked at him," although something in the
portrait still disturbs him. The phrase "in his mind's eye" appears in the
1 6 Concurrent with the development of photography was a resurgence of interest in
physiognomy and phrenology, and the belief that skull and facial features could reveal moral
tendencies. In keeping with this belief, Sir Francis Galton introduced composite
photographs, made “by combining several exposures of specific felons” (Phillips 13), to
predict criminal features. How much might an “honest” portrait of Agnes reveal her sinful
weakness? Ironically, as Sandra Phillips notes, composite photographs “lose all specificity
and impart a fabricated ideal, which may even at times appear angelic” (13). Galton himself
wrote, “A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind’s eye of a
man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree” (223-4) — a job
description which suggests not only literary detectives like Inspector Bucket or Sherlock
Holmes (see Thomas) but Dickens himself!
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previous chapter, when Mr. Brownlow comments, "There is something in that
boy's face.... Where have I seen something like that look before?1 1
After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman
walked, with the same meditative face, into a back ante
room opening up from the yard, and there, retiring into a
comer, called up before his mind's eye a vast
amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had
hung for many years. "No," said the old gentleman,
shaking his head; "it must be imagination." (63)
The theatrical metaphor connects this passage with the novel's many other
references to performance. "In his mind's eye," Brownlow’s memory
becomes confused with imagination. Later, Oliver's "mind's eye" suggests
that he too might recognize his mother's face, an impossible feat.
In its clear association with memory, even in the narrative of how it
came to Brownlow (left by Leeford, who “did not wish to leave [it] behind, and
could not carry [it] forward on his hasty journey” [317]), the portrait of Agnes
acts as a souvenir. For Brownlow, the portrait reminds him of his friend and
indirectly his long lost love; it appears to be the last material connection
Brownlow has with his disappointed youth. But like most souvenirs, it has lost
its importance over time, and here is relegated to the housekeeper’s room.
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Souvenirs serve, according to Susan Stewart, both “ to authenticate a past or
otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to discredit the present.”
The present is either too impersonal, too looming, or too
alienating compared to the intimate and direct
experience of contact which the souvenir has as its
referent. This referent is authenticity. What lies
between here and there is oblivion, a void marking a
radical separation between past and present. The
nostalgia of the souvenir plays in the distance between
the present and an imagined, prelapsarian experience,
experience as it might be “directly lived.” (139)
In Oliver Twist, the painted portrait bridges a gap between authenticity and
nostalgia, between memory and imagination. It serves as a proof of Oliver’s
identity, but, in Mrs. Bedwin’s terms, a far from reliable one, functioning more
on the level of desire and imagination than as evidence. All other objects of
evidence (as opposed to verbal testimonies), souvenirs attesting to Oliver’s
parentage, have been purposefully lost. Only this unreliable one remains,
yet it is more telling than any other object. Its distinct quality is to allow for a
reconstitution of Oliver’s past, erasing in effect the experience of the
workhouse, the coffin-maker’s, and Fagin’s den, and their ability to taint
Oliver’s character. Thus it serves what Stewart identifies as a central
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function of the souvenir: “to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood”: “This
childhood is not a childhood as lived; it is a childhood voluntarily
remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survivals. Thus it is
a collage made of presents rather than a reawakening of a past” (145).
Dickens needs to authenticate the portrait as souvenir, and to do this,
he reflects upon it the characteristics of a mechanical reproduction. When
Brownlow sees Oliver under the portrait of Agnes he recognizes the
resemblance: "There was its living copy. The eyes, the head, the mouth;
every feature was the same. The expression was, for the instant, so
precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with startling accuracy!"
(132). While portrait painters of the time used a variety of “machine[s] for
taking likenesses” to improve the "accuracy" of their work,1 7 the terms
"copy," "instant," "precisely alike," "startling accuracy" suggest the techniques
of photography, which not only offered quick and cheap domestic portraits,
1 7 In the eighteenth century, ‘The middle class wanted portraits; mechanical devices to
eliminate the need for lengthy artistic training were put in its hands, so that anyone could be
something of a draftsman, if not an artist” (Newhall 11). These included the physionotrace, a
mechanism for tracing a silhouette, and the camera lucida, which reflected a sitter’s image
onto paper to be traced.
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41
but were soon adapted to produce mug shots for police identification
purposes. Dickens skirts the issue of the power of such mechanically
reproduced images by describing Oliver himself as the accurate “living copy.”
The description verges on oxymoron, except in terms of biological
reproduction. Here, Dickens asserts the indelible mark of inheritance without
compromising his belief in the artist’s right to improve upon nature.
Dickens wrote at a time in which painted portraits were losing their
credibility as mimetic documents. Sontag notes how "The instability of
nineteenth-century painting's strictly representational achievements is most
clearly demonstrated by the fate of portraiture, which came more and more to
be about painting itself rather than about sitters" (94). Dickens complicates
the meaning of Agnes’s portrait by its having been done by her lover,1 8 not a
professional artist (to which Mrs. Bedwin’s comment refers). Oliver’s father
1 8 Brownlow’s narrative emphasizes the portrait's metonymic function: “He came to me, and
left with me, among some other things, a picture — a portrait painted by himself — a
likeness of this poor girl — which he did not wish to leave behind, and could not carry
forward on his hasty journey” (316-7). The “poor girl” and the picture become the same
object, which cannot be “carried forward.” The portrait almost magically takes on qualities
for Oliver which suggest those of a parent: the eyes “seem fixed upon me ... as if it was
alive, and wanted to speak to me” (71).
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42
< ?
may have interpreted his mother’s beauty and made her "prettier" than she
was, but he also managed to capture her essential features, those which
would also appear in her son's face, as her essential goodness would appear
in his character. Despite its falsifying effects, the portrait in Oliver Twist
serves as (inverted?) evidence of Oliver's birthright, and by extension, his
worthiness and the source of his instinctive goodness. Even the interpretive
artist, intent on protecting his "custom" (as Dickens himself was), could catch
the most important qualities of "reality." By extension, Dickens claims the
"accuracy" of his own art in this novel.1 9
The Broken Pencil2 0
In Emma (1816), Jane Austen’s eponymous heroine develops “a
sudden wish ...to have Harriet’s picture” (27). “’Did you ever have your
1 9 Accuracy was Dickens's particular concern in the 1830s as he transformed from novelist.
“It was the training that Dickens received as a reporter and a sketch-writer... that changed
his work from the kind spoken of as ‘amusing’ or ‘clever’ to that praised for its acuteness....
Dickens’s powers of observation were preferred to his facetious humour...” (Chittick 49).
“ Fox Talbot pointedly labeled the photographic process "the pencil of nature." Dickens
makes an allusion to the same expression, describing Mrs. Corney, the workhouse matron:
“her face, distorted into a mumbling leer, resembled more the grotesque shaping of some
wild pencil, than the work of Nature’s hand” (146-7).
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43
likeness taken, Harriet?’ said she: ‘Did you ever sit for your picture?”’ While
Emma’s young disciple quickly escapes the inquiry, Emma pursues the idea,
much to the delight of Mr. Elton, who Emma believes is falling in love with
Harriet. Austen then launches on an extended discussion of “ taking
likenesses,” which contrasts sharply with the treatment of the same terms
two decades later in Oliver Twist.
The act of painting in Emma is seen as a form of entertainment, and
its product a social commodity rather than a reproduction of nature. Little
value is placed on accuracy; instead, manners, not mimesis, shape the
material world. Austen uses the “likeness” here to reflect much about Emma
herself,2 1 as well as the attitudes of others towards her:
She was not much deceived as to her own skills either
as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to
have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for
accomplishment often higher than it deserved. ... There
was merit in every drawing — in the least finished,
perhaps the m ost.... A likeness pleases every body;
2 1 “Likeness” is of particular concern in Emma. According to a search of electronic texts on
www.pemberlev.com. “likeness” appears in Emma far more often than in any other of
Austen’s novels: 21 times, as opposed to five times in The Watsons and three in Pride and
Prejudice.
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44
and Miss Woodhouse’s performances must be capital.
(28)
Emma believes her “performance” will shine a limelight on Harriet, directing
Elton’s attention and engaging his affection. But the painting has tittle to say
about its subject, Harriet, except to acknowledge her susceptibility to Emma’s
machinations. The “performance” instead produces a portrait of Emma
herself, shown through her well-meaning, but misdirected acts. She “ takes”
Harriet’s likeness just as she takes Harriet herself: to satisfy her own needs.
The quality of Harriet’s “likeness” is judged solely by the viewer’s opinion of
Emma and relative need to please her. “Mr. Elton was in continual raptures,
and defended it through every criticism,” claiming “I never saw such a
likeness in my life.” Mrs. Weston, observing that “ The expression of the eye
is most correct, but Miss Smith has not those eye-brows and eye-lashes,”
blames Harriet, not Emma for the flaw: “It is the fault of her face that she has
not them.” Mr. Knightly bluntly says, “ You have made her too tall, Emma.”
And Mr. Woodhouse carries the desire for realism too far, complaining that
“ The only thing I do not thoroughly like is, that she seems to be sitting out of
doors, with only a little shawl over her shoulders — and it makes one think
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45
she must catch cold” (30-31). Just as the painting portrays Emma more than
Harriet, each comment reveals more about the observer (and his or her
relationship to Emma) than the thing observed. The “accuracy” of vision,
then, is located in the character, desires, and needs of the individual
observer, and not in an external material world.
Mrs. Bedwin’s comments in Oliver Twist are about a different kind of
artist, of course, one with the ability, unlike Emma, to render an “honest”
likeness, but who chooses flattery instead, for the sake of “ custom." And her
rejection of “ the machine for taking likenesses” expresses an anxiety about
which Austen’s characters are completely unconcerned; the possibility of
mechanical accuracy is not a menace in 1816, nor have portraits taken on
the harsh task of confirming identity. Ironically, Agnes’s portrait is even more
compromised by its artist’s desire to flatter not merely for “ custom,” but for
love; Emma has learned not to attempt a portrait when there are husbands
and wives around to judge harshly the results (Austen 29). In its status as
sentimental reproduction, under no shadow from the threat of mechanical
reproduction, the portrait of Agnes nostalgically invokes a lost era.
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46
It contrasts sharply with the interrupted work of a second artist in
Oliver Twist, this time one who employs pencil, rather than paint, and whose
purposes are far from flattery. Towards the end of the novel, at his trial,
Fagin notices "one young man sketching his face in a little notebook.” "He
wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-
point and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have
done” (340). Fagin himself is the idle spectator, powerless to do anything but
look about him and try to avoid thinking of his own impending punishment:
"he could not fix his thoughts upon it.”
Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at
the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron
spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one
had been broken off, and whether they would mend it, or
leave it as it was.
Detailed observation which gives rise to imagination allows Fagin to escape,
momentarily, the fate about to befall him. The sketch artist, in contrast, is full
of purpose, recording Fagin’s trial, perhaps for the police gazette2 2 which
2 2 Miller notes, “Police and offenders are conjoined in a single system for the formation and
re-formation of delinquents. More than an obvious phonetic linkage connects the police
magistrate Mr. Fang with Fagin himself, who avidly reads the Police Gazette and regularly
delivers certain gang members to the police” (5).
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47
Fagin and his gang studied. The artist's capturing of Fagin’s face, his
“ taking” of Fagin’s “likeness,” commits the villain to exposure of the worst
kind: being represented, and thus identified, as a condemned criminal.
Here, power resides in the artist’s work; but when his broken pencil — tool
for both artist and writer — causes him to suspend his efforts, his interrupted
drawing is supplanted by words, as the narrative proceeds. The ability to
take a likeness is given over to the writer. The sketch suggests not only
Fagin’s loss of freedom (his likeness being taken, as he himself was
arrested; his anonymity and its associated security destroyed), but of a shift
in representation which Dickens here records. It contrasts sharply with the
portrait of Agnes, which aimed not at arrest or containment, not at honesty or
reportage, but at a flattering, sentimental likeness, one which accepted the
autonomy of the subject.
The brief description of the sketch artist draws particular attention to
the illustration for this chapter, that of “Fagin in the condemned Cell” (342).
This is the illustration which, in 1874, Cruikshank argued inspired the whole
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48
novel.2 3 It depicts a moment remarkably still in relation to the other
illustrations in the text, which portray moments of action and suggest
melodramatic tableau vivant replete with dramatic gestures (what Meisel
calls the “iconography of emotions”), theatrical lighting, and internal
audiences helping the reader focus attention. Meisel argues that Dickens
understands, as did the theatre of the day, “ the punctuating, emblematic
function of a picture in a narrative” (68). But the melodramatic style of
Cruikshank’s illustrations stands in stark contrast to the movement in
Dickens’s text. For example, “ The Burglary” (139), shows the smoke of the
gunshot shown still hanging in the air and suggests a sudden impression, but
the composition is too posed (the awkward position of the wounded Oliver
looks almost Egyptian), and feels static rather than active. When Dickens
2 3 Frederic Kitton in 1899 reported this apocryphal claim:
The Mayor [of Manchester, in 1874] having referred to the artist’s designs in
Dickens’s novels, Cruikshank intimated that his only work of the novelist he had
illustrated was “Sketches by Boz”; his worship remarked, “You forget ‘Oliver Twist,’”
whereupon Cruikshank replied, “That came out of my own brain. I wanted Dickens
to write me a work, but he did not do it in the way I wished. I assure you I went and
made a sketch of the condemned cell many years before that work was published. I
wanted a scene a few hours before strangulation, and Dickens said he did not like it,
and I said he must have a Jew or a Christian in the cell. Dickens said, ‘Do as you
like,’ and I put Fagin, the Jew, into the cell. Dickens behaved in an extraordinary
way to me, and I believe it had a little effect on his mind. (23)
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49
chooses to arrest the action, the effect is more photographic (the fleeting
moment, captured) than theatrical (the posed, composed image). Nineteenth
century theatre, according to Meisel, exhibited “a severe tension ... between
picture and motion; between the achievement of a static image, halting (and
compressing) time so that the full implications of events and relations can be
savored, and the achievement of a total
dynamism, in which everything moves
and works for its own sake, as wonder
and ‘effect’” (50). Dickens may be
borrowing some of this effect, but his
description moves beyond the theatrical
association and anticipates the function
of a photograph. The action continues
to progress; the pose is not held for contemplation. The impression is set,
and is purposefully retained.
In the illustration, Fagin sits alone, staring into the empty darkness,
apparently frozen in horror, with wide open eyes staring blankly. If there is
SIS
Figure 1 George Cruikshank:
Fagin in the condemned Cell
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50
any movement implied it is minor, chewing of fingernails, fearful trembling. It
is a portrait of terror. The action, as described in the text, is all internal:
He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which
served for seat and bedstead; and casting his blood
shot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts.
After a while, he began to remember a few disjointed
fragments of what the judge had said ....These gradually
fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested
more: so that in a little time he had the whole, almost as
it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was
dead — that was the end. (343)
In narrating the thoughts of the subject, Dickens provides what Cruikshank’s
illustrations cannot, a point emphasized by Fagin’s own narrative progress, in
combining fragments of memories into “ the whole,” a story which coheres
around the sentence, “ To be hanged by the neck ....” The process is
dynamic, controlled by the “narrator” (here, equivalent to Fagin’s point of
view), and it encourages the reader to construct the story simultaneously.
Dickens confronts the visual artist, whether the sketch artist or the one who
might employ a “machine for taking likeness,” and asserts the superiority of
the verbal text. He thus firmly rejects Cruikshank’s claim to authorship.
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51
Both text and illustration actively engage the reader in a process
Meike Bal calls “narrativity”:
The work no longer stands alone; now the viewer must
acknowledge that he or she makes it work, and that the
surface is no longer still but tells the story of its making.
That is what narrativity does to a work of art, be it visual
or literary. (4)
The illustration accomplishes this in two key ways. First, it offers details (in
excess of Dickens’s description of the scene), particularly the up-turned hat
on the bench and the illegible notice on the wall which call out to the viewer.
What does the notice say? Why is Fagin’s hat there? Is it Fagin’s, or is
there someone else in the cell, or peering in? We strain to read the note, to
imagine the hat on someone’s head; thus, the details involve us in rendering
the scene more real. Second, it implicates us in its point of view; unlike
other illustrations for Oliver Twist, this one offers no internal audience.
Contrast it, for instance, with the illustration of the novel’s best known
moment, “Oliver asking for more” (11), in which the other boys show viewers
how to react, or “Oliver plucks up spirit” (37), in which Mrs. Sowerberry’s
shock appears intended to mirror our own. Without an internal audience
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52
depicted, viewers of “Fagin in the condemned Cel!” become invisible,
engaged voyeurs; the hat in the cell might be one of our own, as we look
upon the condemned man.
Just after the description of the sketch artist, Dickens writes, “In the
same way, when he [Fagin] turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind
began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress and what it cost, and how he
put it on” (340). “In the same way” may refer to the way in which Fagin
wonders what the sketch artist is doing, but it also suggests that he, like the
sketch artist, is recording the scene around him. He doesn’t need to list the
details of the judge’s dress; the visual world serves merely to stimulate his
imagination, which constructs a narrative, free from the demands of visual
“ truth,” a process which provides him an escape, for a moment, into his
imagination. In this way, the verbal text offers more details than the
illustration, without the restrictions imposed by a visual reality. Dickens
remains free to invent. Consider, for instance, if Austen’s novel had been
illustrated: who would have dared attempt a portrait of Harriet, limiting it to
one image, rather than the varied impressions that arise from the ensuing
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53
dialogue.2 4 The portrait of Agnes functions in the same way; the effect
would be destroyed by an illustration. By extension, even the most exacting
machine for taking likenesses is inferior to the writer flexing the limitless
power of language to express and involve, to escape the oppressiveness of
material reality and celebrate the imagination.2 5
Dickens uncannily predicts how what seems the oppressive exactness
of mechanical likeness (photography) can free the other arts from the
confines of mimesis. The painter, John Constable claimed,
... it is the business of a painter not to contend with
nature, and put this scene (a valley filled with imagery 50
miles long) on a canvas of a few inches, but to make
something out of nothing, in attempting which he must
2 4 Here the television film featuring Kate Beckinsale gets the moment right; we see everyone
looking at the picture, but we never see the picture itself. Contrast this with the Emma
starring Gwenyth Paltrow that appeared the same year, in which we see a fairly conventional
drawing, briefly, of a female figure in an allegorical pose. The image is completely
unnecessary.
2 5 This, of course, is the theme Dickens later explores in Hard Times (1854). Many years
later, the photographer Henry Peach Robinson, in an argument against truth being found in
photographs offering “mirror-like similitude,” relied on Hard Times to help him claim,
Then there are many varieties of photographers. There are two kinds, both of which
I hold to be wrong, and to miss the truth. There is the Mr. Bounderby of
photography, who must have facts and nothing but facts, and there is the misty man
who persuades himself that his pictures are artistic because they are out of focus. It
seems to me that the place to seek truth is somewhere between these extremes.
(57-8)
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54
almost of necessity become poetical, (qtd. in Galassi
27)2 6
The photograph can be relegated to the task of “contending] with nature,”
leaving the field open to other forms, to other artists, to “make something out
of nothing.”
Fox Talbot was convinced that photography would
record the truth and reality that many contemporary
artists were striving to give their work. The camera, he
thought, would reveal the blemishes, the imperfections,
the details ignored by the painter. And so it did, and by
imitating art it freed art from the constraints of
naturalism; without photography, it can be argued, there
would have been no Impressionism. (Lassam 18)
The incomplete sketch at the end of Oliver Twist stands as an
important sign of the development of a photographic sensibility. Peter
Galassi argues that before photography, sketches “presented] a new and
fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions
and discontinuous, unexpected forms. It is the syntax of an art devoted to
2 6 Galassi can only assert Constable’s point by crossing disciplinary boundaries and using
terms associated more with language than visual arts (as Constable himself does with the
choice of “poetical”). For example, Galassi writes, “By showing, in their variations, that even
the most humble scene offered a variety of pictorial aspect, the painters claimed an active,
potentially poetic, role in their works” (27). “Poetic” becomes equated with making
“something out of nothing.”
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the singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable.” 2 7 Galassi
adds, “It is also the syntax of photography” (25). The sketch artist in Oliver
Twist suggests Dickens’s self-consciousness of his novel’s place in “an
artistic environment that increasingly valued the mundane, the fragmentary,
the seemingly uncomposed — that found in the contingent qualities of
perception a standard of artistic, and moral, authenticity” (Galassi 28). The
novel attempts to resolve the conflict between authenticity which
acknowledges the ’’immediate, synoptic perceptions,” the “discontinuous” and
the “ fragmentary,” and the need to assert both artistic and moral authority,
located in a controlling, composing, self-conscious perspective. This is the
conflict which the mechanism of photography masks: the machine taking
likenesses appears to record without human intervention, but it requires an
operator, a mindful eye which points the camera and chooses the shot.
2 7 Galassi's arguments have not gone unchallenged. Solomon-Godeau, for instance, refutes
Galassi’s primary claim that photography evolved from concerns about perspective or other
fine art concerns (see also Kraus 289 ff). But Galassi’s depiction of the importance of the
sketch and how it reflected a changed notion of perception as a sudden impression)
establishes an important connection to the photograph, one also recognized by Gernsheim
in noting that early photographs were often referred to as “drawings” or “sketches” in
England. After all, Talbot’s first book of photographs was called The Pencil of Nature.
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56
Oliver Twist, months before the new technology is made public, already
engages in some of the debates it will ignite.
In the end, Dickens asserts the power of the mind over the eye (thus,
the “mind’s eye”) and the predominance of words over images, the product of
imagination over that of the machine. Vision has extreme power in Oliver
Twist, but it is only vision rendered meaningful by point of view, an
engagement by a moral sensibility. For example, Brownlow tells Monks of
the consequences of Nancy’s reports, and the power of sight in shifting her
loyalties: “ the sight of the persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it
the courage and almost the attributes of virtue” (318-9). A “machine for taking
likenesses,” any mechanical intervention, compromises the capacity of an
individual’s direct, corporeal vision and the imaginative, moral response
which it can stimulate, and thus threatens Dickens’s project. His shield is up,
ready to encounter the challenge of photography.
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57
Works Cited
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Gabriel Pearson, eds. Dickens and the Twentieth Century. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. 49-64.
Bryson, Norman. ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field. Vision and Visuality.
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Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times.” Selected Writings. New York:
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Chittick, Kathryn. Dickens and the 1830s. New York: Cambridge University
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Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
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Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
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“ A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In Film Form. Ed. and trans. Jay
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Emma. Dir. Douglas McGrath. Perfs. Gweneth Paltrow, Toni Collette,
Jeremy Northam, Greta Scacchi. Miramax Films, 1996.
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Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott Company, n.d.
Galassi, Peter. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of
Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981.
Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London:
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Gernsheim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. New York: Thames and
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Meisel, Martin. Realizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
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Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Los Angeles: University of California
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Musselwhite, David E. Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the
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Picturing Dickens
It does not matter how abstracted the depicted face is, or
if it is an icon, symbol, or fiction; what concerns us is
that it does still signify an other, another’s face: an
announcement of communication, the beginning of
countless dramatics, a locus of potential passions, an
allegory of the human soul, and a potential embodiment
of personal ethics. (Sobieszek 27)
Charles Dickens’s career grew alongside photography’s development
as technology, art, and commodity. Due in part to photographed portraits,
marketed as stereographs and cartes-de-visite as well as reproduced in
etchings and paintings, the anonymous “Boz” became an easily recognized
celebrity. In 1893, Charles Kent sentimentally recalled about his friend,
Wherever Dickens appeared in the capital — north,
south, east, or west — his presence was instantly
recognized. Thanks to his ubiquitous photographs, his
identity was perceived — by every chance crowd, by
literate and illiterate alike, even by those who has never
seen him before — to be that public benefactor who had
been for so many years the good genius of their homes.
(qtd. in Collins, Dickens 2:242)
Seeing photographs of himself for sale in the windows of shops of
every variety, Dickens felt, at times, “public property” (Ackroyd 853), an
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61
impression he both cultivated and sometimes resented. He sat for some of
the most prolific and important professional photographers of his time. None
of the resulting portraits can be considered a work of art, nor do they capture
his most human (as opposed to most commercial) aspects. This may be the
result of several factors, most prominent being Dickens’s own dislike and
distrust of the new technology. His many portraits (“he said at one time that
he had promised enough photographic sessions ‘...to haunt mankind with
my countenance’” [Ackroyd 853]) — testify to his acquiescence to the
necessities of fame and market forces, not to his interest in the form.1 The
photographs present the reader with the visual construction of “Dickens,” as
genius, gentleman, and commodity. In them, Dickens creates and
consolidates a public persona, and avoids revealing his deeper, private self.
The photographic portraits of Dickens can be read from several angles, along
some of the lines established by John Berger, when he claims, “ A radial
1 Curtis notes that Dickens sat for over 80 photographs (236). The Oxford Reader’s
Companion to Dickens identifies nine separate sittings, which each produced multiple
images, between 1852 and 1867.
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system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen
in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic,
everyday and historic” (67).
Around 1850, when Dickens first sat for a photographic portrait (fig. 1),
a series of technical innovations and
legal clashes were making possible the
widespread availability of cheap
reproductions. William Henry Fox
Talbot’s protection of the patent for his
calotype and Richard Beard’s battle to
defend his right to license
daguerreotypes in Britain were coming
to an end. Photography was clearly
established as a valuable commodity,
and not merely a scientific wonder or artistic tool. By 1851, Frederick Scott
Archer’s wet collodion process, combined with L. D. Blanquart-Evrard’s
albumen-coated papers, made possible shorter exposure times and less
Figure 1 Daguerreotype by Henri
Claudet (around 1850)
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63
expensive multiple copies. The same year, the Great Exhibition completed
photography’s public introduction, exhibiting among other wonders
stereographs — paired images which could be viewed with Sir David
Brewster’s 1849 invention, the stereoscope, for a 3-D effect.
Once freed of patent restrictions, photography flourished among both
amateurs and the swiftly growing ranks of professionals. Portrait studios
blossomed across London and throughout Britain. By 1854, Andre-Adolphe-
Eugene Disderi’s cartes-de-visite camera, which produced eight four-by-two
and a half inch exposures on a single negative, made inexpensive portraits
widely available to a broad spectrum of the public, as both subjects and
consumers of images. John Jabez Edwin Mayall proved the colossal
commercial potential of the carte-de-visite in 1860; his Royal Album,
featuring the Queen and her family, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In
just the first week following Prince Albert’s death in 1861, 70,000 images of
him, by various photographers, were sold. “Cartomania” and “stereomania”
— the collecting of photographs of friends, celebrities, famous sights, and
artworks — had taken hold.
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64
Turning the pages of a Victorian album of cartes-de-visite or shuffling
through a box of stereographs reveals portraits exhibiting a pattern of similar
poses, props, and compositions — the product of both technical and
commercial limitations. The lengthy exposure times for early photographs
(even collodian prints required that a subject hold still for up to two minutes to
guarantee a sharp image) often necessitated elaborate apparatus to keep a
sitter motionless. These became the subject of much amusement in the
hands of satirical cartoonists, including Dickens’s illustrator, George
Cruickshank. Even when mechanical devices to restrict movement were no
longer required, photographers used supporting furniture, columns, or
statuary, and poses which took advantage of these props. Long exposures
caused smiles to droop and eyes to glaze over, resulting in expressions
which can be described as somewhere between dreamy and distorted, and
which threatened, rather than nourished, the sitter’s vanity. “It will, I
presume, be universally admitted, that a photographic portrait is not a
favourable representation of the sitter,” Sir David Brewster wrote in 1857. “It
will be generally admitted that many of these are hideous portraits: and there
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65
are some who maintain that the photographic portrait patient, male or female,
often ceases to be human” (84). This was the subject of much
disappointment and amusement for the Victorians. For example, Punch
replied to the suggestion, in 1855, that there be a “portrait gallery of
criminals” kept in every prison in England, by noting,
The idea may have some value, but we must confess
that we never saw any photographic portrait yet, which
did not give us the idea of a criminal; and if a man were
to be hung on account of his look, there is hardly an
individual that has been photographed, who might not
have been fairly hanged instead of his own portrait.
(Punch 14)
Criticism of photography and its tendency to insult rather than enhance a
sitter’s self esteem challenged the commonly held faith in its core value: its
ability to record reality directly. Brewster quotes the Times of October 10,
1857: “Most portraits rather surprise the original at first sight, and the terrible
faithfulness of photography has disgusted many a would-be Narcissus”
(Journal 84).
Conformity, rather than uniqueness, appears to have been the most
common aim of photographic portraiture. Studio photographers repeated
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6 6
settings and compositions to hasten the turn-over of customers and to keep
prop inventory at a minimum. Sitters, in turn, sought to replicate the ideal
image of the respectable Victorian man, woman, or family, an ideal
represented in the ubiquitous photo portraits of the royal family. According to
Elizabeth Heyert, “Uniformity of appearance ... strengthened class distinction
and served to solidify middle class values and mores” (34). While attesting to
the sitter’s desire to fit a type, a photograph “advertised the presence of
personality” (Clarke 103). “ To “have one’s portrait done” was one of the
symbolic acts by which individuals from the rising social classes made their
ascent visible to themselves and others and classed themselves among
those who enjoyed social status” (Tagg 37). The “symbolic act,” however,
was a vicarious one; the images created were heavily controlled by
commercial “operators” in portrait studios commonly called “operating
rooms.” In the face of production costs, profit margins, and increasing trade,
professional photographers left more “artistic” (and thus risky) innovations to
amateurs who were not required to respond to the dictates of the market.
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67
Dickens followed the commercial line. None of the photographs of
him venture far from the conventional poses, props and settings to be
expected of studio photographers. Some are distinguished by Dickens’s
fashionable dress or dramatic beard, the sharpness of the details or the
ornamentation of the furniture, but most portraits place him in hackneyed
poses, seated or standing at a writing desk or lectem — the dignified,
successful man of letters, rather than romanticized genius. Each is highly
textualized and easy to read: the
famous author holds a pen or paper
knife, a book or sheaf of papers. The
props and poses place the figure within
knowable, explainable narratives,2
rather than offering the mysterious,
other-worldly, soul-revealing effects
2 Dickens often fits his own description of a miniature painted by Miss La Creevy in Nicholas
Nickleby, of “a literary character with a high forehead, a pen and ink, six books, and a
curtain” (18).
Figure 2 Clementina, Lady
Hawarden: Clementina and Isabella
Grace Maude
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6 8
found in the portraits by amateurs like Lady Hawarden, Julia Margaret
Cameron, or Lewis Carroll (all working in the 1860s).3
Hawarden produced over 800 photographs between 1857 and 1864,
almost exclusively of her three daughters. Primarily full length portraits, they
are as much studies of costume and fashion as they are of individuals (fig.
2). They borrow heavily from paintings, as did most art photography.
Virginia Dodier writes, “In many ways Hawarden’s costume tableaux, which
despite their fanciful nature remain portraits of her daughters, are reminiscent
of Reynolds’s paintings featuring aristocratic beauties as mythological
heroines” (51). Whatever their specific inspiration, the photographs clearly
exceed their indexical function and invite rereadings, such as that of Carol
Mavor, who declares, “[U]nlike the standard images found in Victorian family
3 According to Grace Seiberling, once portrait photography had entered the booming market,
most amateurs lost interest in the genre, “the expansion of commercially available portraits
of famous people must have put an end to any illusion ... about the closed circle of
distinguished men who were enthusiasts for photography” (70). Carroll, Cameron, and
Hawarden’s work, however, was, in a sense, only made possible by the professionals.
“Once photography was well established, these amateurs could work against the
conventions” (71).
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69
albums, these photographs overflow with folds of sexuality and an invitation
to touch” (xvii).
Cameron followed her mentor David Wilkie Wynfield (a painter who
tried photography for a short time) in pursuing painterly effects like soft focus,
costuming, and compositional allusions to Old Master precedents. Unlike a
professional studio photographer, Cameron knew her sitters; even the most
“eminent Victorians” among them were
invited guests. Her photographs go far
beyond establishing identity or
conferring rank. Rather, they evoke
moods, elevate her subjects — ranging
from celebrities to her housekeeper —
to classical or biblical status, and
explore the intersections between the
real and the ideal, accuracy and
inference. Cameron confessed, “[M]y whole soul has endeavoured to do its
duty towards them [her sitters] in recording faithfully the greatness of the
Figure 3 Julia Margaret Cameron:
Alfred Tennyson (1865)
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70
inner as well as the features of the
outer man” (qtd. in Linkman 36).
This Cameron achieves in capturing
the shadowy depths of Thomas
Carlyle’s stare, or the patrician lines
and wild mane of Alfred Tennyson
— in an image he dubbed “ The
Dirty Monk” and Cameron likened to
that of Isaiah or Jeremiah (fig. 3).
White hair and beards become halos and crowns; eyes seem to turn their
interest inward or to higher matters. A hint of costume — a draped cloak,
perhaps — appropriates the grandeur of the past. These are images in
which external appearances attest to profound inner lives. Cameron
concentrates on her sitters’ heads and faces, rather than allowing setting or
clothing to dilute the impression. About the portrait of Sir John Herschel (fig.
4), Clarke writes:
The body has been reduced to the head only, without
any sense of background or external reference; the
Figure 4 Julia Margaret Cameron:
J.F.W. Herschel (1867)
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71
head becomes an iconic presence implying intelligence,
individualism, and above all, genius. .... Herschel stares
directly at the camera, suggestive of a parallel inner
gaze and, in turn, reinforcing the sense of single-
mindedness. But equally Herschel’s genius is
adumbrated by the way his eyes stare into space as he,
supposedly, contemplates matters of an astronomical
and universal stature. His hair is meteor-like, as if the
face came at us from a physical universe rather than a
social world. (Clarke 105)
In all of Cameron’s portraits can be recognized a purpose they share
with portrait painting:
As part of their professional rhetoric painters proclaimed
their ability to penetrate the very minds of their sitters, to
fathom the deep recesses of character and to translate
the very essence of their being onto canvas as a
permanent record for posterity. Such a claim added a
spiritual and oral dimension to the painters’ work. It also
proved of immense value in bolstering the professional
mystique and social prestige of the artist painter.
(Linkman 35)
Cameron can be said to have attempted the same by mimicking the
techniques of the painters, but none of her efforts could disguise two central
facts of photography: the real continues to loom large, and the “deep
recesses of character ...the very essence of their being,” rather than being
revealed by the imagination and skill of a painter, was under the scrutiny of a
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72
machine. Ironically, Cameron was as often criticized for her lack of technical
expertise as she was for her artistry.
Cameron’s work is consistent with several popular nineteenth century
“sciences” which asserted the importance of an individual’s appearance and
informed the making and reading of photographic portraits.
Dominating this culture was the belief that a person’s
character, subjectivity, or even soul could be read in the
features of the face (physiognomy), the shape of the
skull (phrenology), or the expressions of the emotions
(pathognomy). In short, the outward signs of a person’s
face signified the inner character of that person.
(Sobieszek 17)
Champions of physiognomy celebrated photography’s testimonial properties
as providing evidence of their theories;4 in turn, photographers could borrow
from the pseudo-science. Utilizing the “language of the physiognomy, the
expression of the look,” allowed the photographer, according to Disderi, to
“do more than photograph, he must ‘biographe’” (McCauley 41).
4 See, for instance, John Conolly, ‘The Physiognomy of Insanity” (1858; collected in Taylor
18-21). Conolly discusses engravings of a photograph which “instead of giving pictures
which are merely looked at with idle curiosity, furnishes such as may be studied with
advantage” (19).
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73
Changing urban demographics revitalized interest in physiognomy.
Phillips writes,
In the nineteenth century, the perceived threats to the
upper and middle classes came essentially from the
lower classes, those who inhabited the cities in the great
wave of industrialization. Because they were poor,
lacked education, and often fell victim to disease, it was
convenient to think of these people as belonging not only
to a different class, but to a different race. Social
thinkers found evidence for this in what they saw as a
propensity for a low state of morality, and a concomitant
propensity for crime. Such philosophers believed that
the ease with which the poor might enter into crime was
revealed in their appearance. Thus, when a criminal
was visualized by popular moralizers — including
Charles Dickens and Gustave Dore — he looked like a
brute, like a less evolved being. (14)
In its connection to identification and detection, physiognomy cast over
photography the dark threat of someone being unwillingly exposed. By
extension, the camera was believed capable of capturing unintended
appearances and of exposing hidden truths. Distrust of photography also
arose out of the association between the form and the supernatural (see
especially Heyert 44-46). ‘There were enthusiasts of photography who
spoke of the ‘alchemical magic of the black box,’ its semi-occult powers to
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74
freeze time, to divine the inner secrets of personality, to resurrect life after
death” (Holmes 202). The great French photographer, Nadar, described
Honore de Balzac’s fear of daguerreotypes:
Since Balzac believed man was incapable of making
something material from an apparition, from something
impalpable — that is, creating something from nothing —
he concluded that every time someone had his
photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was
removed from the body and transferred to the
photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the
unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is,
the very essence of life.” (from Quand J’etais
photographe, rpt. in Rabb 8)
Physiognomy, phrenology and mesmerism come together in the
opening of Dickens’s satirical sketch, “Our Next Door Neighbor,” in which
“Boz” speculates on the association between the characteristics of door
knockers and the inhabitants of houses.
The various expressions of the human countenance
afford a beautiful and interesting study; but there is
something in the physiognomy of street-door knockers,
almost as characteristic and nearly as infallible. ... Some
phrenologists affirm, that the agitation of a man’s brain
by different passions, produces corresponding
developments in the form of his skull.... Our position
merely is, that in such a case, the magnetism which
must exist between a man and his knocker, would
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75
induce the man to remove, and seek some knocker
more congenial to his altered feelings. {Boz 40, 41)
The humor here thinly veils Dickens’s own interest in these pseudo-sciences,
and his understanding of them may have contributed heavily to his attitude
towards being photographed. It is telling that Dickens’s understanding of
photography and its power conceivably came from his friendship with
Chauncy Hare Townshend, considered the chief English proponent of
mesmerism (an interest Dickens shared) as well as an important connoisseur
of early photography (see Haworth-Booth 15).
Dickens’s preference for conventional (as opposed to artistic) portraits
suggests a fear of photography’s untested powers of detection and exposure.
Susan Sontag claims that “ the camera cannot help but reveal faces as social
masks” (59), and Dickens certainly had much to fear from the possibility that
the mask might crack and reveal his hidden life, both past and present. His
distrust of all kinds of portraiture surfaces throughout his works, in which,
according to Curtis, “Painted portraits serve as types of soul traps ...
animated voices from the past that serve as ghosts and moral rejoinders,
haunting the memories of those in the present” (235). Dickens’s comments
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76
on his photographic portraits suggest there was much discomfort about the
process, and he rarely liked the results: he “generally damned all
photographs of himself as either grim or ferocious” (Ackroyd 853).
Most importantly, rather than create some abstract impression
(whether of genius or guilt), the
images of Dickens are meant to fit
solidly into a pantheon of icons
which included the Royal Family
(Mayall, for instance, also
photographed Dickens). Dickens
was photographed almost
exclusively for purely commercial
purposes, not artistic ones.5 In
this, Dickens had every reason to acquiesce. He wanted his pictures to sell,
5 An exception can be found in the series of photographs taken by one of the Watkins
brothers in 1859, intended to substitute for the lengthy sittings required for the painting of his
portrait (in this case, by W.P.Frith).
Figure 5 The Gurney photograph (1867)
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77
to promote the sale of his publications, and to enhance his own fame. One
example of his participation in profiting from his photographs occurred during
his second tour of America. In 1867, he and his impresario, George Dolby,
agreed to allow J. Gurney and Son, Photographers, exclusive rights to
produce portraits, in part to avoid unauthorized reproductions from flooding
the market and to create what amounted to a profitable trademark (fig. 5;
see Curtis and Kappel).6 Despite the pact, Dickens sat twice for Matthew
Brady for pictures which were exhibited in Brady’s collection of famous faces.
The two sets of portraits speak to two desires on Dickens’s part: for profit
and for fame.
The primary function of the photographs of Dickens was to record and
advertise the identity of the author (and the suggestion of a mug shot is not
accidental). But as he stares through the camera and past its operator, it’s
as if Dickens, circumventing mechanical mediation, challenges his unseen
6 According to the Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, the novelist considered the
Gurney photo his favorite and vowed never to be photographed again (Schlicke 472).
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78
audience to make something of his face. We are forced to interpret his
features, in part by employing the skills acquired from reading Dickens’s own
works. For example, how do we make inferences from Dickens’s
appearance, or how do we suppose he understood his own portraits, once
we have read how he analyzes characters, often, as in his depiction of
Thomas Gradgrind, using physiognomy as a shortcut to character analysis:
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a
schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger
emphasized his observations by underscoring every
sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The
emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a
forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his
eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves,
overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped
by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard
set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice,
which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the
skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to deep the
wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like
the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely
warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. (Hard
Times 7)
Dickens often confirms what Abigail Solomon-Godeau calls an “absolute
belief in the legibility of appearances,” to which photography offers “ the
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79
technical analogue” (155). But his faith seems threatened by photographic
portraits. Take, for instance, his curious description of Reginald Wilfer in
Our Mutual Friend: “If the conventional Cherub could ever grow up and be
clothed, he might be photographed as a portrait of Wilfer” (75). The image is
difficult to untangle, but it presumably describes a fictional human in terms of
an impossible photograph of an imaginary celestial being — in costume, no
less. The implication here is that photographic portraits are not accurate
records of an observed world, but miniature costume dramas.
Performance is a frequent subject in the photographs of Dickens,
which were widely used to promote his reading tours. Several essentially
reproduce the well-established setting Dickens used, and any review of his
stage appearances could easily serve to describe these photos. For
instance, in October 1858, one newspaper reported,
Mr. Dickens, as his own showman, makes every
provision that the public may enjoy a good stare at the
lion. Mr. Dickens carries with him an artistically
arranged apparatus for framing himself. The back
ground is of a well chosen brown, the carpet is green,
the desk is green, and in front of Mr. Dickens are, not
foot-lights, but face-lights, i.e., a line of gas jets [the
gasman was a crucial member of the touring entourage],
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80
shielded from the audience by a drapery of the same
brown colour, but throwing their light full on the face and
person of the reader, (qtd. Collins 10)
Although the color scheme changed on later tours (the drapery became
crimson or maroon), the arrangement appears to have been consistent.
“One glance at the platform,” American journalist Kate Field reported, “is
sufficient to convince the audience that Dickens thoroughly appreciates
‘stage effect’” (13). Dickens’s tour-manager from 1866 onward, George
Dolby, reported the contents of the reading desk: “On the left hand of the
reader, on either side of the table, were small projecting ledges — the one on
the right for the water-bottle and glass, and the other one for his pocket-
handkerchief and gloves” (qtd. in Collins 11). The descriptions are confirmed
by drawings, etchings, and woodcuts which appeared in journals like
Illustrated London News, as well as the posed and composed photographs
which advertised or commemorated the readings. For example, Herbert
Watkins’s 1859 stereographs simulated Dickens’s reading at St. Martins Hall
that year (fig. 6). Dickens holds his reading text and a paper knife; his elbow
rests on an oblong box which serves as a useful prop to steady the sitter, but
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Figure 6 Herbert Watkins: Dickens reading at St. Martin's Hall (1859)
apparently was integrated into the readings as well, as a contemporary
account attests:
On this block the reader rests his book, and uses it,
beside, as an accessory in his by-play. Now it is Bob
Cratchit’s desk in Scrooge’s office. Now it is Mr.
Fezziwig’s desk, from which he looks benignantly down
on his apprentices. Now it is the desk on which rests the
Christmas goose of the Cratchit family. A very useful
little velvet box Mr. Dickens makes it, I assure you, and
the audience gets to look upon it as quite a delightful
piece of furniture, (qtd. in Collins 12)
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82
The photographs of Dickens with his stage props are intended to give
the audience a vicarious thrill, a sense of “being there,” particularly enhanced
by the 3-D effect of the stereographs. The same can be said of photographs
which show Dickens writing (fig. 7). These are not portraits of genius, as,
say, Cameron’s photographs of
Tennyson might be called; these
are images of a successful
professional man of letters — all
the more appropriate hero for the
Victorian consumer. He is very
much a man of his time, working
for his success. In the same way
that Victoria is photographed as
the ideal wife, the monarch reduced to matron, Dickens is seen as a
professional, rather than godlike seer.
This theme is also reflected in the photographs of Dickens and his
daughters taken in 1866 by studio photographer Robert Hindry Mason on a
Figure 7 Fradelle & Young: Charles
Dickens (date unknown)
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83
visit to their home at Gad’s Hill Place. The
pictures blend two themes which could be
seen as in conflict, that of the famous writer
and the pater familias. In one shot, Dickens is
seen reading a book, ostensibly to or with his
daughters, who peer over his left shoulder
(fig. 8). In another, Dickens looks to the side
of the camera; behind him, the daughter
over his right shoulder gazes at the ground ahead of her father, while her
sister, at the father’s left shoulder, seems
to catch the eye of the photographer (fig.
9). These familial compositions would be
easily recognized by Victorians; Katie
Dickens herself collected similar subjects
in cartes-de-visite (her album is in the
Dickens House Museum in London). In
both photographs, Dickens, dressed in a
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Figure 9 R.H. Mason: Dickens,
Mamey and Kate (1865)
Figure 8 R.H. Mason:
Dickens reading to Mamey
84
light colored, somewhat rumpled suit, appears more relaxed than in his
studio portraits, but his stiff, frozen posture makes him still seem an unwilling
participant in the process. The girls are more natural in their poses, even
though their role is limited to surrounding their famous father like drapery or
decor.7 The pictures were shot outside, with uncertain light and the
intrusion of some garden furniture, which definitely distinguishes these
images from the formal studio
works. Comparing them to
similar shots by Lewis Carroll
reveals how Dickens, whether by
his own discomfort with posing or
his selection of photographer,
manages to remain disengaged
with the photographic process.
7 Man seated, women standing, suggests the poses involving Prince Albert and Queen
Victoria, who was much shorter than her consort but needed to be shown as superior.
Figure 10 Lewis Carroll: George
MacDonald with his eldest daughter,
Lily (1863)
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85
Place Mason’s garden pictures of Dickens, for instance, alongside
Carroll’s portrait of the novelist George MacDonald and his eldest daughter
Lily (fig. 10). Carroll shot this in his glasshouse studio, against a garden wall
backdrop which appears again and again in his photographs. Like Dickens,
MacDonald is seated, with his daughter standing. But here, while his right
hand holds the signifying book, the novelist’s left arm encircles his daughter’s
waist, his hand appearing under her arm to finger her narrow belt. Her right
arm, in turn, is draped over her father’s right shoulder, with the forefinger
unselfconsciously crossed over the thumb. She clasps her garden hat with
her other hand (as one of Dickens’s daughter holds hers), her head bent low,
her nearly closed eyes either dazed (mesmerized?) or directed on the book.
MacDonald looks at the camera, rather than the book, and his gaze
challenges the viewer to read the inferences in the image. The framing is
closer and more intimate than in Mason’s picture, and given what we now
understand about Carroll’s predilection for photographing children, the
picture is highly suggestive.
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86
So too is another family portrait by
Carroll, of John Everett Millais, his wife,
and their two daughters (fig. 11). Here,
the family is squeezed within a window
frame, the parents turned away from the
camera, and only one pouting girl staring
at the photographer. Each parent
encircles one of the girls with an arm, yet
the figure in the center seems carefully positioned to appear as if pulling
away.8 Perhaps the window frame is intended to suggest Millais’s
occupation, as painter; otherwise, this portrait seems to express a narrative
separate from notoriety, a glimpse into personal affections and private life.
The portraits of Dickens and his daughters, in comparison, remain strained
and aloof.
8 In placing Millais’s daughter at the center of the composition, Carroll suggests a
characteristic of Millais’s own work, what Robert M. Polhemus calls “faith in the child,” a
belief he shared with Dickens (as well as Carroll). “John Millais did in his painting what
Dickens did in the novel: made the child a crucial Victorian subject of faith, erotics, and
moral concern, and imagined perceptions and conceptions of childhood that have great
historical significance” (Polhemus 289).
Figure 11 Lewis Carroll: Mr. and
Mrs. Millais with their two
daughters (1865)
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87
Above all, the consumers of Dickens’s photo portraits were not
seeking complex narratives; rather they were fulfilling their need to identify
Dickens as one of them. Gerald Curtis’s comment on frontispiece portraits,
which takes as its impetus the engraving from David Maclise’s painting of
Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), can apply to the ubiquitous
photographs of the author as well:
For the Victorians the “art of seeing” meant a dramatic
rise in the use of frontispiece portraits — reflecting a
desire to observe the ultimate voice of creation and an
almost biblical belief in a connection between fiction, a
nonfictive voice, and a real world. They believed that
visual images of the nonfictive face offered insights into
Dickens’s fictive world. (Curtis 242)
Dickens’s general dissatisfaction with the photographs of him suggest that
the face being seen by the public was itself a kind of fiction. As Kate Field
writes in Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings: Taken from Life:
If any one thinks to obtain an accurate idea of Dickens
from the photographs that flood the country, he is
mistaken. He will see Dickens’s clothes, Dickens’s
features, as they appear when Nicholas Nickleby is in
the act of knocking down Mr. Wackford Squeers; but he
will not see what makes Dickens’s face attractive, the
geniality and expression that his heart and brain put into
it. In his photographs Dickens looks as if, previous to
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88
posing, he had been put under an exhausted receiver
and had had his soul pumped out of him. This process
is no beautifier. (Field 13)9
The “idea of Dickens” is key here: far from proof of a “real world,” what the
photographs offer, in their careful posing and promotion, is a virtual
“Dickens,” sanitized, purified, and made available to fulfill the purchaser’s
needs. “Celebrity portraits may, like other “ type” photographs, be indexical,
but what they index has nothing to do with the model photographed; rather,
they are indices to our fantasies, our passions, and our dreams” (Sobieszek
140). While celebrity photos project an exact reproduction of nature, what is
seen has little to do with the “real” person who is ostensibly the subject of the
photograph.1 0
As photographs increased the availability of celebrity images and
material success gained importance under capitalism, writers in particular
9 Field is expressing a common response of those who met Dickens first in the photographic
portraits, and later in person. The Daily Spy in Worcester, Massachusetts, reported in March
1868, that “even when feeling very ill [Dickens] bore in public a ‘genial expression’ of which
photographs gave no idea” (Collins, Dickens 302). Mary Boyle noted, that seeing him, “...I
feel sure that his was a countenance most difficult to arrest (if I may so express myself), from
its extreme mobility, and constant change” (84).
1 0 This supports Griselda Pollock’s assertion that “Photography does not record a body in
representation but produces a body for representation” (33).
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found themselves caught in the trap of notoriety. Leo Braudy argues that
from the 1850s onward, writers showed that
The conditions of modern celebrity have begun to press
recognition upon them as a goal — the portrait, the
caricature, the photograph, the speech, the interview.
But what do such goals have to do with their real work?
Their ambition, particularly the spiritual ambition that
sets out to make a difference to the moral, intellectual,
and aesthetic history of the world, always seems
doomed to failure. (Braudy 488)
While recognizably one of the causes of the problem of fame, the photograph
was also the perfect vehicle for expressing it. First, it represents a change in
the value of images themselves: from the unique painted portrait to the
readily available and inexpensive cartes or stereographs. The shift is both
commercial and social, as portraits escape from the homes of the elite and
enter High Street shop windows. Even the means of production reflect the
shifting value. A painting offered, according to Graham Clarke, “ the assumed
distillation of a personality.... individual meaning is established through a
series of codes and symbols by which the self is at once framed and
advertised.”
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But of course the portrait was a study over time,
whereas the photograph suggests an instantaneous
capturing. The portrait in oils claimed to give a
composite, even definitive, image of the personality — a
formal representation in which was embodied an
assumed status and public significance. (Clarke 103)
Whereas, “ The painter acquires a conceptual ideal of his subject through
leisurely sittings, extending over days, weeks or months,” as William Darrah
explains, ’’the photograph is an image captured in an instant, a fraction of a
minute or of a second by a machine which is mechanically accurate” (24, 25).
While making a permanent record of a transitory moment, a photograph
provides evidence of the ephemeral quality of appearances, even of those of
the famous, and, by extension, chronicles the fleeting nature of fame itself.
Celebrity cartes, published in their thousands, were not
restricted to retail concerns devoted solely to
photography. They could also be purchased individually
from a wide range of outlets including print shops,
stationers, booksellers, fancy goods and novelty
emporia, and even from vendors in the street. ... Such
promiscuity, however, exacted its inevitable toll over
time, reducing these commercial portrait cartes to
nothing more than mere novelties and knick-knacks, the
legitimate province of the fancy goods merchant, never
that of the serious art connoisseur. (Linkman 66)
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Woe betide the Great Man who found his image moved from a prominent
position in a shopkeeper’s window in order to provide appropriate space for
the fresher face of the moment.
For critics and biographers looking back on the nineteenth century,
photographs “seemed to have altered something about the very nature of
history and the past itself (Holmes 203). As biographer Richard Holmes
realized, looking at portraits by Nadar,
It struck me that from 1850 onwards a wholly new kind of
biography might be possible — because of photography.
For here was the beginning of the “modern age”: these
people would never be lost in “history.” Here they were,
alive, like us, flesh and blood, and touched by the marks
of life. (204)
But in his photographic portraits, “Dickens” seems to slip away from us. As
images of him pile up, multiply, he seems to retreat even further behind
conventional masks and carefully designed performances. In their
multiplicity, the photographs of Dickens fail to pin him down. Somewhere in
their abundant re-productions — as paintings, etchings, cartoons,
caricatures, and, more recently, on bookmarks, tea towels, and coffee mugs
— he eludes our grasp.
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Works Cited
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986.
Brewster, Sir David. Journal of the Photographic Society. 60:4 (November
21, 1857).
Clarke, Graham. The Photograph. New York: Oxford University Press,
1997.
Collins, Phillip. Dickens: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. Totowa,
New Jersey: Bames & Nobles Books, 1981.
“Dickens’s Public Readings: The Kit and the Team.” The Dickensian
74 (January 1978). 8-16.
Curtis, Gerard. “ The Visual Market.” Ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L.
Patten. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995. 213-49.
Darrah, William C. Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography.
Gettysburg, Penn.: W. C. Darrah, 1981.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Norton, 1990.
Nicholas Nickleby. London: Pan Books, 1968.
Our Mutual Friend. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.
“ Our Next Door Neighbor.” Sketches by Boz. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991. 40-46.
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Dodier, Virginia. Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life 1857-1864. New York:
Aperture, 1999.
Field, Kate. Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings: Taken from
Life. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1998).
Heyert, Elizabeth. The Glass-House Years: Victorian Portrait Photography
1839-1870. Montclair and London: Allanheld & Schram/George Prior,
1979.
Holmes, Richard. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. New
York: Viking, 1985.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, ed. The Golden Age of British Photography 1839-
1900. New York: Aperture, 1984.
Kappel, Andrew. “ The Gurney Photograph Controversy. The Dickensian 74
(April 1978). 167-172.
Linkman, Audrey. The Victorians: Photographic Portraits. London: Tauris
Parke Books, 1993.
Mavor, Carol. Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess
Hawarden. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
McCauley, Elizabeth Ann. A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Moss, Sidney P. “ A New-found Mathew Brady Photograph of Dickens.”
Dickens 79:2 (Summer 1983). 105-107.
Phillips, Sandra S. “Identifying the Criminal.” Eds. Sandra S. Phillips, Mark
Haworth-Booth, Carol Squiers. Police Pictures: the Photograph as
Evidence. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.
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Polhemus, Robert M. “ John Millais’s Children: Faith and Erotics: The
Woodsman’s Daughter (1851).” Ed. Carol T. Christ and John O.
Jordan. Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 289-312.
Pollock, Griselda, “ The Dangers of Proximity: The Spaces of Sexuality and
Surveillance in Word and Image.” Discourse 16.2 (Winter 1993-94).
3-50.
Punch in Camera Land. London: Focal Press, 1948.
Rabb, Jane M., ed. Literature & Photography Interactions, 1840-1990: A
Critical Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1995.
Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Sieberling, Grace. Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Sobieszek, Robert A. Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul,
1850-2000. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Taylor, Jenny Bourne and Sally Shuttleworth. Embodied Selves: An
Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998.
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Telling Shadows:
Photographic Sensibility in Bleak House
In 1851, as Dickens sat down to write Bleak House, he was immersed
in the growing popularity of photography among exactly that segment of the
population whom he hoped would purchase his novel and whose values the
novel celebrated. While Bleak House, set in the decade before the
announcements of both the calotype and the daguerreotype, avoids direct
reference to photography, what I call a photographic sensibility fills its pages.
Not only is the narrative described at times as if through photographic lenses,
but the novel's structure repeatedly refers to the ideology of the camera.
Dickens started writing Bleak House the same year the display of
photographs at the Great Exhibition proved that photography could achieve
both artistic and commercial success, precipitating photography's move out
of scientists' labs and artists' studios and onto the mass market. There were
already commercial photographic studios in London (the first appeared there
in 1841), Bath, Cheltenham, Southhampton, Leeds, York, Hull and
Doncaster. The Society of Arts held the first exhibition solely of photographs
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(over 700 prints) in London in 1852, the year Bleak House began to appear
monthly. The following year, Roger Fenton led the movement to establish
the Photographic Society of London (later the Royal Photographic Society),
for "the promotion of the Art and Science of Photography, by the interchange
of thought and experience among Photographers." By 1857, Lady Elizabeth
Eastlake, whose husband served as the first chairman of the Photographic
Society, declared that "photography has become a household word and a
household want":
[It] is found in the most sumptuous saloon, and in the
dingiest attic — in the solitude of the Highland cottage,
and in the glare of the London gin-palace — in the
pocket of the detective, in the cell of the convict, in the
folio of the painter and architect, among the papers and
patterns of the millowner and manufacturer, and on the
cold brave breast on the battlefield. (40)
Her catalogue readily suggests the world of Bleak House.
Even though Dickens never explicitly refers to photography in Bleak
House, the novel was firmly entrenched in a culture irrevocably changed by
the appearance and growing importance of the still new medium, as evident
in Cuthbert Bede's 1855 Photographic Pleasures. A short illustrated work,
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Photographic Pleasures countered the new form's frightening capabilities by
ridiculing those who "refuse to see a smile on the face of science, and look
upon her only as a grim old hag" (14). At one point, Bede directs his jibes
against portrait photography, which required long exposures and tortuous
braces to hold still the head and other extremities. "In fact," Bede asserts,
"you must be a particularly steady character if you want to form the
acquaintance of our friend Camera. If you are at all unsettled in your habits,
he will have nothing to do with you. You must be a model of stiff propriety
and rigid deportment, like Mr. Turveydrop" (40). In admitting that
photography cannot reproduce "the colours of nature ...the proper force of
blues, bright reds and yellows," Bede again alludes to Dickens. Photography
"cannot properly get over the matter of greens — it cannot say with Mrs.
Bagnet, in 'Bleak House,' "them greens is off my mind!" (60). Bede's
discovery of humorous models for ideas about photography in Bleak House
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acknowledges not only Dickens's popularity, but the novel's participation in a
photographic culture.1
Certainly Dickens was familiar with photography. As a popular
novelist and celebrity, he was photographed by several leading Regent
Street photographers, and his image was sold in two common forms: as
cartes-de-visite and stereographs. Dickens' daughter collected both
stereographs and cartes-de-visite in several albums, and he must have been
familiar with them. He enjoyed a friendship with Chauncy Hare Townshend,
whom he met in 1840 due to their mutual interest in mesmerism (and who,
according to Haworth-Booth, served as the model of Twemlow in Our Mutual
Friend and Cousin Feenix in Dombey and Son). In the 1850s, Townshend
was the only major collector of photography in Britain (besides Prince Albert).
1Bede also mentions Mr. Pickwick's having to sit for his “portrait" as he is carefully observed
by the turnkeys in the Fleet Street Prison:
"Sitting for my portrait!" said Mr. Pickwick.
“Having your likeness taken, sir," replied the stout turnkey. “We're
capital hands at likenesses here. Take 'em in no time, and always exact.”
(Dickens, Pickwick 621)
This scene is recalled in Bleak House when Mr. Bucket first appears: “he looks at Mr.
Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait" (275).
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Townshend often shared his collection with his dinner guests, which
frequently included Dickens.
Thus, Dickens could not have escaped the influence of photography.
Bleak House is replete with signs of the presence of the new form. In its
insistence on the visual and its attention to how Esther as a narrator sees,
the novel can be profitably read in relation to changing ideas about vision,
which in the nineteenth century were "inseparable from a massive
reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad
ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject"
(Crary 3). At the time, Jonathan Crary argues, "the visible escapes from the
timeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another
apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human
body" (70). Bleak House points out what Crary fails to acknowledge: the
limits placed on the "human subjectVhuman body" by gender. Esther's first
person narration, her claims of objectivity intermingled with her confessions
of prejudice, counterbalances the omniscient narrator's tale, illustrating how
all seeing is in some way dictated, and in particular shaped by the prevailing
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ideology. By analogy, the camera provides a perfect model for
understanding Dickens's complex narrative strategies in Bleak House, in that
the photographic camera temporarily masks the instability of visual
perception. In addition, understanding the impact of the new technology on
Dickens's culture allows for a fresh reading of some of the novel's major
themes.
The Photographic Effect_________
Christian Metz identifies "the photographic effect" as that of "a laser
or lightning, a sudden and violent illumination on a limited and petrified
surface" (163). This "effect" might describe several occasions in Esther
Summerson's share of the narrative of Bleak House. While Dickens clearly
chooses to call attention to the "sudden and violent illumination," the
epiphany contained in each of these occasions, the structure of the scenes
and their suggestion of the full process of photography — not merely the
freezing effect, but the relationships between camera, operator, and subject
— reveal a complex system which counterposes objectivity and subjectivity,
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involvement and neutrality, observation and reflection, and which both
disguises and reveals the pressures of ideology at work.
Before looking at specific scenes in the novel, it is important to
establish a working understanding of the camera as a model for ideology.
Ideology can be defined as a political belief so ingrained into social behavior
that it is rendered invisible, or, as Terry Eagleton puts it, forms culture into
nature. This, I will argue, is similar to the attitude initially taken towards the
function of the camera and its “ operator," the term which precedes the use
of the specific "photographer." The camera is seen to be a neutral observer,
merely the vehicle of the "pencil of nature" which produces a direct image
without intervention or mediation. As described in Oliver Twist, it is the
machine which takes the likeness, not the operator.
In fact it was feared that the apparent neutrality of the camera would
keep photography from achieving the status of art. In 1853 Sir William
Newton argued in The Journal of the Photographic Society that often "the
object [of a photograph] is better obtained by the whole subject being a little
out of focus" in order to reveal "the true character of nature" (6). Without a
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blatant indicator of interpretation, Newton implies, the photograph can not
achieve anything beyond mere reflection — science, not art. The apparently
neutral image, without affect, offered merely "the thing itself." Of course, this
quality of photography suited the belief in an objective, scientifically knowable
universe; it made "reality" more solid, dependable, something which could
be captured, studied, and exchanged. It suggested control over the
Romantic universe.
Early discussions of photography in The Journal of the Photographic
Society and the reports of the jury at the Great Exhibition shows the
popularity of this position. For example, when William Henry Fox Talbot
requested to renew his patent of the calotype process, the Photographic
Society turned against him, arguing that photography should be impersonal,
public property, a commodity best developed on the open market rather than
the artist's studio. The struggle to maintain a belief in the objectivity of the
camera reveals a desire to maintain the camera's status as a model of the
impersonal, as the sign of neutrality; it also points to the failure of that
project.
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Much of the early writing about photography shows the Victorians
slowly admitting that while the hand and eye of the operator may initially
seem invisible, they are actively at work, beginning at the earliest stages of
the taking of an image, even in the decision to photograph at all, as opposed
to sketching, painting, or even describing in words. The choice of process,
camera and film; the distance from camera to subject, the angle and
placement; the lighting; the particular moment selected for the exposure;
the length of the exposure; as well as the various options for developing the
image — all these details and more render any photograph unique, dictated
by the consciousness (and sometimes unconscious or subconsciousness) of
the photographer. No photograph, with or without "being a little out of focus,"
can possibly be said to present "reality" unmediated, either by individual
desire or cultural forces. The photograph functions not unlike cultural
practices at large: the product appears neutral, yet it is fully influenced by
the individual photographer and, by extension, the prevailing ideology.
Visual set pieces in Bleak House suggest photographs: the effect of a
sudden flash, the pretense of objectivity, and the ability to reproduce (and
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reconstruct) a moment from the past. In key scenes, Esther becomes self-
conscious about her mode of narration, and examines in particular her
process of seeing as a means of understanding better what she has seen
and how her point of view dictated the meaning the particular scene retains
in her memory and story. These moments accumulate like photographs in
an album, inviting re-telling. Each of the scenes create a sense of
immediacy for the reader — you are there, with Esther, as she sees what is
occurring, experiencing the moment as well — and thus leaves an
impression of Esther's neutrality, as she seems to withdraw into the position
of the "objective" narrator, the mere watcher-on, and we are left to judge for
ourselves what the encounter means. The suggestion of a photograph
endows each moment with greater importance, simulating the reader's own
experience of reconstructing the past by perusing images. At the same time,
Esther's stated self-consciousness, while calling special attention to a scene
and its importance in the story, forces consideration of how the visual model
functions for Dickens as a mask for the ideology he promotes. One is
reminded of Irigaray's analysis of Plato's parable of the cave as dependent
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upon maternal metaphors while denying the material feminine as other than
"scenery to make the show more realistic" (265). Esther is barely "material"
for Dickens, except in so far as her body can be marked or scarred by what
she sees, experiences, or refuses to admit.
On her first evening at Bleak House, Esther watches John Jamdyce
"stopping a moment" to "glance" at his wards, Richard Carstone and Ada
Clare. "His look was thoughtful, but had a benignant expression in it which I
often (how often!) saw again: which has long been engraved on my heart."
The description layers filter upon filter: Esther sees Jarndyce looking, then
sees what he sees: "Upon the wall, their shadows blended together,
surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught from the
unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects .... The mystery of
the future, and the little clues afforded to it by the voice of the present,
seemed expressed in the whole picture" (68-9). The shadows on the wall
remind the reader of a camera obscura or a magic lantern show, but Esther's
treatment of her memory, as visual details to be looked at again and again,
and re-narrated again and again, suggests the uses of photographs. Esther
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interrupts the flow of her retrospective narrative to explain why she recounts
this particular moment:
But it is not to recall this fancy [about the "mystery of the
future"], well as I remember it, that I recall the scene.
First, I was not quite unconscious of the contrast in
respect of meaning and intention between the silent look
directed that way, and the flow of words that had
preceded it. Secondly, though Mr. Jamdyce's glance, as
he withdrew it, rested for but a moment on me, I felt as if,
in that moment, he confided to me — and knew that he
confided to me, and that I received the confidence — his
hope that Ada and Richard might one day enter on a
dearer relationship. (69)
In this scene, the reader learns how to read Esther's narration, a crucial skill
given that this occurs only three chapters into Esther's story. Its combination
of flickering image and furtive glance, the exchange of looks, the subject of
sexual desire, the contrast between "meaning and intention," the privileging
of image over words, the differentiated power of a woman's look as opposed
to a man's — all this supports reading this scene as pivotal in understanding
the role Esther's narrative plays in the novel. The peculiar importance given
to the moment separates it from the flow of narrative around it: the particular
visual image seems to stop temporal movement (as a photograph does),
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requiring that the moment be re-animated, re-narrated — as Esther's
parenthetical aside exclaims, "(how often!).” Ironically, Esther avoids
claiming her own reading of the visual scene (of Richard and Ada); instead,
she reads through Jamdyce's glance, inviting our reading of the dynamics of
her point of view.
The scene's meaning depends upon the assumed
relationship/understanding between Esther and John Jamdyce. Upon first
meeting Jarndyce at Bleak House, Esther recalled "the gentleman in the
stage-coach" she had encountered six years earlier, when she first left her
aunt's house. "I was certain it was he. I never was so frightened in my life
as when I made the discovery, for he caught my glance, and appearing to
read my thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I thought we had lost
him" (60, emphasis mine). What she fears most, it seems, is his ability to
take control over her somehow, here of both her "glance" and the privacy of
her own thoughts.
Given how clearly the scene invokes Plato's cave, Irigaray's analysis
particularly helps decifer the roles here. Esther gives voice to Jamdyce's
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silent glance at the same time that she serves as the object of it. The
feminine, Irigaray argues, provide the means of representation, the vehicle,
the access to production/reproduction. Esther is merely the conduit through
which Dickens, via his character Jarndyce, inscribes the Law of the Father
and perpetrates the Family Romance. Jarndyce represents the patriarchy by
more than simply the privilege of his gender. Esther suspects for a long time
that he might be her father; he certainly acts as a parent to Esther, Richard
and Ada; and he accepts Skimpole as a benevolent father might. Like most
of Dickens's fathers, he is neglectful. He can't speak directly to Esther in the
coach, he can’t discipline Skimpole effectively, and he suffers to look on
while the Jellyby family crumbles, allowing Esther to do the work in his stead.
He is also eccentric, as shown in his queer reports on the state of the east
wind. Jamdyce's weaknesses might seem to feminize him, but they do not
threaten his status as representative of the patriarchy, a privilege that is
given, rather than earned.
In the scene by the "unsteady fire," Jamdyce and Esther serve as
potential parents (in a kind of immaculate conception) to Richard and Ada,
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benevolent lookers-on as well as, we later learn, partners themselves.
Esther struggles against acknowledging Jamdyce's own desire for her, since
it runs counter to the teachings of her aunt, who led her to fear contact with
others which might breed disgrace. More importantly, given that Esther
narrates from the position of knowing the outcome of events, her refusal to
recognize Jamdyce's hidden desires here protects her innocence, leaving
her free later to shift from Jamdyce's proposal to marriage with Alan
Woodcourt. The threat of Jamdyce's "open secret" surfacing is suggested
when Esther remembers the gentleman in the stagecoach, and senses that
Jamdyce needs to hide his past — she attributes it to his shyness and his
style of philanthropy, but it suggests guilty behavior.
Esther’s own power of observation, and her ability to read glances, is
clear. She believes herself almost immediately authorized to speak for
Richard and Ada, in response to Jamdyce's query about Mrs. Jellyby,
because "glancing at Richard and Ada, [they] entreated me with their eyes to
speak" (60). Dickens makes much of Esther's ability to understand through
her capacity to see and understand others' "speaking" eyes. Thus, he
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establishes a narrative position which is self-consciously visual, in which
glances can be read (and misinterpreted). This is no new approach for
Dickens. But Bleak House exhibits a certain self-consciousness about
vision; sight provides access to psychological insights, and can be
conceived as a location of great power, one differentiated by gender. In
relation to Richard and Ada, Esther clearly has superior power. They are the
coddled heirs, she the orphan of dubious parentage and loveless childhood;
they are obviously physically attractive and Esther firmly believes she is not.
But both her sight and /nsight dominate them; she, the dependent, brought
home to serve as Ada's companion and Jamdyce's unpaid housekeeper, in
turn is dominated by Jamdyce's desires. Esther functions best in exactly the
primary arenas in which the nineteenth century woman could watch, without
fear of sanction: the domestic and the philanthropic. As the woman who
looks, and the woman who is looked at, as spectator and spectacle, Esther
serves as both a vehicle to promote ideology and a commentator upon it.
As Jonathan Crary writes in Techniques of the Observer.
What begins in the 1820s and 1830s is a repositioning of
the observer, outside of the fixed relations of
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interior/exterior presupposed by the camera obscura and
into an undemarcated terrain on which the distinction
between internal sensation and external signs is
irrevocably blurred. If there is ever a "liberation" of
vision in the nineteenth century, this is when it first
happens. (24)
Esther's vision is far from "liberated"; instead, through a complex web of
triangulation and denial, it is trapped by gender constraints, made possible
only by a strategy of distance and disavowal. Later, Esther's observation
techniques will contrast with broader concerns about surveillance in the
novel, but at this moment it is quite clearly a process for seeing without being
seen — a position which suggests the process of photography (it's the
"machine" that "takes" the likeness, not its "operator"). The analogy to
photography gives the impression that Esther's subjectivity arises from a
"real referent" (see Metz156) and invites participation with Esther in her
reading of the scene's "meaning and intention."
Although the flickering shadows of Ada and Richard cast upon a wall
most suggests a magic lantern, the process of Esther's narrating the event,
re-telling it from memory several years after all the events the novel recounts
are completed, causes the scene not to be read as an ephemeral
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experience, one which disappears when the lamps are relit. Instead, it
recalls the image as a souvenir, like a photograph, capable of being re-seen
over and over, re-narrated, re-understood. Susan Stewart writes,
The photograph as souvenir is a logical extension of the
pressed flower, the preservation of an instant in time
through a reduction of physical dimensions and a
corresponding increase in significance supplied by
means of narrative. The silence of the photograph, its
promise of visual intimacy at the expense of the other
senses (its glossy surface reflecting us back and
refusing us penetration), makes the eruption of that
narrative, the telling of its story, all the more poignant.
For the narration of the photograph will itself become an
object of nostalgia. (138)
Esther's narration "erupts" from the visual moment, its retelling "(how often!)"
indicating the image's ability to somehow reduce and codify a particular
lesson she needs to learn.
In the scene Esther describes, attention shifts from Ada and Richard
themselves, their bodies, to the shadow cast on the wall, first motionless,
then re-activated by the process of reflection (Esther's own memory and
narrative). What gives rise to thoughts about "the mystery of the future," is
not the thing itself (what does Richard say to Ada, or she to him? what does
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the gesture mean to them?) but the silent "picture" seen in the cast shadows,
which can then have imposed upon it other meanings. From whence do
those meanings arise? In this scene, they seem dictated not by Esther as
interpreter, but by Esther reading what she thinks Jarndyce reads — what he
"confides" in her, and seems to force her to accept. Richard and Ada,
referred to as "motionless objects," enter into a kind of timelessness; frozen
by Esther and Jamdyce's separate glances; the image cast then becomes
reanimated by their reading of it. Even the process, the "unsteady fire,"
serves to reanimate the still image; Richard and Ada themselves are
inconsequential to this scene, which focuses on narrative process, and the
relationship between Esther’s narration and the patriarchal glance of
Jarndyce.
Esther's reflection on the scene resonates with meanings which
exceed those Esther can admit. The conventionalized pose, with the
woman at the piano, the man standing over her, looking down, suggests
paintings of Dickens's time, but other details — the specific light, the framing
within a room (a camera), the reflection of "motionless objects," Esther's
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sudden flash of recognition — point more directly to photographs. Of course,
studio photographers borrowed heavily from the visual vocabulary of portrait
painters; in fact, most of the early commercial photographers had been
commercial portrait painters before moving into the new field. But key
elements of this scene are limited to a photographic model; for instance, the
way in which the camera can provide its operator and inevitably the viewer of
the subsequent photograph with a voyeuristic safe distance from the subject.
Richard and Ada remain completely unaware that they are being watched;
only the camera allows for the visual recording of a moment without the
"taker" being seen. Analyzing this scene in relation to photography increases
the sense of an important shift away from the subject of the observation
(Richard and Ada) and onto the "operators" of the gaze, Esther in contrast to
Jarndyce, the feminine as opposed to the patriarchal observer.
Esther clearly privileges what is seen over what is said. In the scene,
she refers to Skimpole's preceding "flow of words," about wanting the world
to be a path "strewn with roses" rather than "brambles of sordid realities,"
admitting that she finds words untrustworthy, and recognizing that Skimpole
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himself manipulates them: he "spoke of himself as if he were not at all his
own affair, as if Skimpole were a third person" (66).
He was quite enchanting. If I felt at all confused at that
early time, in endeavoring to reconcile anything he said
with anything I had thought about the duties and
accountabilities of life (which I am far from sure of), I was
confused by not exactly understanding why he was free
of them. That he was free of them, I scarcely doubted;
he was so very clear about it himself. (66)
Esther needs to determine Skimpole's "meaning and intention" in order to
determine whether to believe him or to accept his point of view. Her
relationship with Skimpole is primarily one of words, with her reasoning (as
represented in language) undermined by his own rationalizations of his
behavior.
Esther's special attention to the scene before the fire almost lifts it
outside of verbal narration and approximates the way in which photographs
narrate. "Photographs in themselves do not narrate," John Berger writes.
Unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves
preserve meaning. They offer appearances — with all
the credibility and gravity we normally lend to
appearances — prised away from their meaning.
Meaning is the result of understanding functions. (55)
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Understanding gives meaning to relationships between the elements within
the frame of the photograph, ranging from figures and objects, to
background, to the distance between camera and subject. S n addition, the
viewer "reads" the photograph's relationship to other photographs alongside
it, in, say, an album or a film; to the caption or explanation; or to other
images, prior to, simultaneous to, subsequent to the photograph itself. The
still image itself is silent, but it is never truly alone, because it always already
exists in relation to other language or images.2
2Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1966) explicitly examines the way in which the still photograph
tempts its viewer to re-animate, re-narrate the captured moment, to replace it into a narrative
flow. The photographer, played by David Hemmings, begins shooting a series of
photographs in an apparently innocent park. He captures a young woman (Vanessa
Redgrave) embracing an older man. The woman sees him, and chases him, asking for the
film. He refuses. Later, he thinks he sees a man trying to steal his camera from his open
car. The woman from the park shows up at his studio, apparently willing to do anything to
get back the photographs. Curious, he develops the film, and displays a series of blow-ups,
moving between them in succession to establish a narrative by virtue of the relationship
between images. The film follows this closely, the sequence mirroring the process of the film
itself, which is nothing if not a series of still images ordered sequentially. The photographer
believes he discerns a gun appearing from the bushes and the body of the man lying in the
bushes. He returns to the park and finds the body, but by the time he returns home, the
negatives have been taken and all but one print stolen. No one believes his story; the
photograph which remains is too grainy and meaningless outside the context of the series in
which he has placed it. The film ends with the photographer chasing an invisible ball to
return to mimes playing tennis.
Antonioni's film now seems to have predicted some of the ways in which film has been
manipulated to change the apparent story it projects. In the first trial against the police
(footnote continued on following page)
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These relationships suggest those which exist between what is
essentially a series of still photographs placed side by side — film. Metz
designates the photograph as having a smaller leis (the unit of reading) than
film because even a fragment of a film is enlarged (his emphasis) by sound,
movement, and other production elements (155).
The photographic effect is not produced from diversity,
from itinerancy or inner migrations, from multiple
juxtapositions or arrangements.. . . Where film lets us
believe in more things, photography lets us believe more
in one thing. (163)
But I believe that every photograph already exists within a complex cultural
system that instantaneously "enlarges" each still frame. If we "believe more
in one thing" when we "read" a photograph, it is only a sort of serial
monogamy; we believe in one reading at a time. Even Metz emphasizes the
officers accused of brutally beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, defense counsel
directly addressed the prosecution's most powerful evidence: the amateur video tape which
showed King being repeatedly hit by police batons and kicked by several officers. Whereas
the prosecution showed the tape at regular speed, allowing the images to speak for
themselves, the defense played the tape in slow motion, sometimes frame by frame, still by
still, and simultaneously provided the all-white jury a contrasting verbal narration, one in
opposition to the narrative the film itself suggested. The prosecution set out to show that the
police force was warranted by King's resistance. The strategy worked, and the shock waves
from the not guilty verdict reverberated on the streets of Los Angeles in the largest urban riot
in American history.
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importance of the photograph inviting repeated and "lingering look[s]" (155);
it is, in his argument, the characteristic that most associates the photograph
with the fetish.
Esther's scene is closer to photography than to film because hers is
always a private vision, and rarely a collective one (another element of
Metz's argument). She is the "master of the look," in the sense that she
determines what she sees, for how long, and within what frame. Thus she
resembles the camera operator, more than an observer. Even when she is
observing Jamdyce watching Richard and Ada, she chooses the direction of
her gaze. Most importantly, her comments suggest that she has returned to
the same small lexis repeatedly, recognizing (if not directly articulating) the
possibility of multiple meanings, multiple possible narratives, from the same
frozen image. Thus, while Esther reports a conventional interpretation —
what she sees is innocent love in bloom — the structure of her narrative
invites other readings (the "dearer relationship," for example, might be seen
in terms of its human cost).
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Like the photograph, which appears to stop time and even counteract
death even while eulogizing the "death" of the moment it records, "The fetish,
too, means both loss (symbolic castration) and protection against loss," Metz
argues (158). What has Esther lost? She recalls the moment because it
records her loss of innocence, her sense of being safe and outside some
circle of desire and desiring, capable of being a neutral observer. Instead,
from her position as Mrs. Woodcourt, having rejected Guppy and Mr.
Jamdyce, she must re-conceive her innocence, and argue for it. This isn't
surprising in an economy based on the perpetual threat of women's desire.
The result of Esther's recognition, her subsequent re-telling of the
moment in light of her knowledge of later events, is similar to that of a
snapshot, what Metz called as "an instantaneous abduction of the object out
of the world into another world, into another kind of time" (158). Metz's
description suggests another of the themes of Bleak House: its nostalgic
celebration of a supposedly stable past simultaneous to its recognition of an
unpredictable, tumultuous, and confusing present and future. This theme is
epitomized in the character of Lady Dedlock, particularly through her painted
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portrait. Once her image is reproduced, commodified, and out of her
personal control, she is destroyed.
Reproducing Lady Dedlock_______
In Chapter VII of Bleak House, Mr. Guppy and his friend, Tony
Jobling, tour Chesney Wold. Weary of viewing portraits of Dedlocks, "whose
family greatness seems to consist in their never having done anything to
distinguish themselves, for seven hundred years" (82), Guppy spies a
painting, which "acts upon him like a charm." It is a portrait of Lady Dedlock,
"considered a perfect likeness." "Has the picture been engraved?" Guppy
asks, believing he has seen a copy of it. The "copy" Guppy recognizes, the
reader later learns, is the face of Esther Summerson, Lady Dedlock's
illegitimate daughter.
Like Oliver Twist, Bleak House has at its center a painted portrait
which in part confirms the mysterious origins of the novel's central character.
But whereas Agnes Fleming's portrait remains a static and silent witness to
the miraculous recovery of her son, Oliver, Lady Dedlock's portrait is
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activated, mysteriously reproduced and circulated. On the most mechanical
level, it reappears in the collection of “ The Divinities of Albion, or Galaxy of
British Beauty," a set of "copper-plate impressions . . . representing ladies of
title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined with capital, is
capable of producing" (256), owned by Guppy's friend Jobling (also known as
Weevle). But it is reproduced in other ways as well, from the maid
Hortense's imitation of Lady Dedlock for Jo's identification, to Esther's similar
appearance (giving a natural as well as mechanical meaning to "reproduce").
These reproductions chronicle the disappearance of one way of life, and
warn of the threats inherent in the new.
Lady Dedlock's portrait suggests photography in part due to the
important connections between portraiture and the growth of photography.
Photography threatened, and eventually supplanted, the commercial
importance of painted portraits, particularly the most widely purchased form,
the miniature. In the 1840s and 1850s, the studios of portrait painters quickly
transformed into photographic studios, as the speed, accuracy and low cost
of having one's likeness taken encouraged a greater number of people to
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indulge in a vanity previously limited to the rich. Talbot himself was rather
slow to come to portraiture, in part because of the difficulty imposed by the
long exposure times on moving, breathing subjects.3 But, he admitted in The
Pencil of Nature, "when a group of persons has been artistically arranged,
and trained by a little practice to maintain an absolute immobility for a few
seconds of time, very delightful pictures are easily obtained." He did
recognize the potential for using the calotype to record exact likenesses:
"What would not be the value to our English nobility of such a record of their
ancestors who lived a century ago? On how small a portion of their family
picture galleries can they really rely with confidence?" Talbot's questions are
suggestive here. Portrait photography has market "value" (again, the
combination of "art" and "commerce"). It also promises absolute
identification, so that families can "rely with confidence" on their family (and
their own) identities. Since Lady Dedlock's "perfect likeness" is used by
3|His own early "portraits," in Pencil of Nature and elsewhere, show little beyond the details
of dress and surroundings. One example shows two unidentified men near a barn; another,
a "portrait" of his wife and daughters, shows all the ladies' faces hidden by the bonnets,
suggesting the illustrations in Bleak House of Esther, her face masked by her bonnet.
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Guppy to identify Esther's mother, before the more circumstantial evidence of
Captain Hawdon's handwriting surfaces, Dickens may have been referring to
the use of portrait photographs — mug shots — for identification of criminals.
It is even possible to suppose that in not specifying the means by
which the portrait was copied without permission, Dickens alludes to the
debate at the time over the "stealing'1 of paintings by means of photographs.
Photographing art objects was a common practice, one which allowed
broader access to and knowledge of masterpieces, even to those who lacked
the means or the leisure time to travel to see them. Talbot noted that it was
easy to photograph sculptures because one could completely control the
lighting and the subject never moved. Photographs also provided more exact
reproductions than etchings or lithographs, and defied the copyright laws,
which controlled the production of drawn copies and provided lucrative fees
to painters. Eventually, by the end of 1870, photography put an end to “ the
swollen value of copyright, which had made mid-Victorian artists's fees what
they were.. . . None will pay for copyright as heretofore if there is not remedy
against photographic piracy" (Gillett 92). Dickens may have been thinking of
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how such a reproduction placed into public circulation what had previously
been very much the objects for the private consumption of the aristocracy,
including the beauty of aristocratic women.
Lady Dedlock falls victim to a kind of nineteenth-century paparazzi
effect, in which privacy — the private ownership of one's own image, the
separateness of classes, and even the security of one's stately home — is
severely compromised, threatening the breakdown of distinctions between
self and other, between classes, and between properties. This breakdown
can be blamed in part on Lady Dedlock herself, whose sexual transgressions
are not only symptomatic, but according to the novel seem to be the cause of
the breakdown. Her attraction to and affair with someone below her
aristocratic station brings both the end of the line and disgrace to the Dedlock
name. Thus, the portrait fails to represent Lady Dedlock's true life (including
her past, and her inner life), and its reproduction (in Jobling's collection, in
Esther's face, both bringing about the threat of exposure) causes her a loss
of integrity from which she cannot recover.
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The particularly slippery nature of the portrait stands in sharp contrast
to the essential qualities of the photograph. "Painting can feign reality
without having seen it," Barthes writes. “Discourse combines signs which
have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often
‘chimeras.’ Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny
that the thing has been there" (76). While the "photographic referent" is "not
the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily
real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would
be no photograph" (76), "no painted portrait, supposing that it seemed 'true'
to me, could compel me to believe its referent had really existed" (77). "The
man who invented the machine for taking likenesses might have known that
would never succeed; it's a deal too honest," states Mrs. Bedwin in Oliver
Twist (71). The prominence of the painted portrait in Bleak House
deliberately acknowledges that honesty; its mysterious reproduction
pointedly contrasts its "dishonesty" with the easier, cheaper (more
democratic), and more exacting image which photography would offer. Lady
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Dedlock's true self could not escape the camera's eye as it did the painter's,
and as it cannot escape Bucket's pursuit.
Lady Dedlock's portrait itself is decidedly not photographic, in merely
recording "reality"; rather, it serves an iconographic function, capable of
being read as symbol of status and pride. But everything about the lady
herself suggests the frozen presence of the photograph. Her appearance
seems intended to promote stasis: her face "improved into classicality by the
acquired expression of her fashionable state" (13).
My Lady Dedlock, having conquered her world, fell, not
into the melting, but rather into the freezing mood. An
exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an
equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or
satisfaction, are the trophies of her victory. She is
perfectly well-bred. (13)
An admired object, "She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being quite
out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals — seeing herself in her glass,
where indeed she looks so" (14). The description ironically predicts, even at
this moment of apparent privacy, the public exposure she later endures,
when others, like the narrator, will look on her face and read into it whatever
they want to "suppose." Unlike that of Dorian Gray, as she undergoes
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devastating changes, her portrait remains static, activated only through its
reproduction.
Reproductions, according to Walter Benjamin, cause an object to lose
its "aura," "the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand"
(209). Reproductions represent a culture of change and uncertainty for
Benjamin, a sacrifice of uniqueness for democratization. In theorizing the
social impact of cheap, mechanical reproductions, including photographs, he
identifies the increasing social fragmentation in the nineteenth century as
giving rise to the need to construct some cohesive ideology.
Day by day the need becomes greater to take
possession of the object — from the closest proximity —
in an image and the reproductions of an image. And the
reproduction .. . is perceptibly different from the original.
Uniqueness and duration are as closely intertwined in
the latter as transience and reproducibility in the former.
The removal of the object from its shell, the
fragmentation of the aura, is the signature of a
perception whose sensitivity for similarity has so grown
that by means of reproduction it defeats even the
unique. (208)
Lady Dedlock's "reproducibility" is a symptom of what her husband, Sir
Leicester, justifiably fears: the "confusion into which the present age has
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fallen; . . . the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the
uprooting of distinctions" (350). In Bleak House, woman becomes the sign of
both the cause and effect of such disruption. Lady Dedlock is not merely a
victim of reproduction, but is herself judged to be the cause. Her beauty has
inspired the artist, who in turn tempted the copyist/photographer/thief.
Jealousy and unfair treatment have inspired the maid Hortense to
"reproduce" Lady Dedlock in order to implicate her former mistress.
Hortense's pretending to be a lady reflects Lady Dedlock's own
pretenses, raises issues about both the falsehood of women as a class, and
reflects a new attitude towards female morality. Deborah Cherry points out
that beginning in the 1840s, the term "lady" lost its eighteenth century
aristocratic associations and was used increasingly "to identify a middle-
class femininity ordered around conduct and appearance rather than given
by birth or rank" (120). The exchange of clothes between Lady Dedlock and
Hortense and the identification of the "lady" by Jo depending primarily on
appearance expose the false status of the aristocratic lady, all image without
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moral substance.4 That morality would revitalize the aristocracy, Dickens
suggests; without it, the class must die out.
Essentially Bleak House is a novel about the control and purification
required to secure a middle class stability. At the heart of Bleak House is the
issue of status and respect. Lady Dedlock's Christian name, Honoria,
suggests the importance of this theme. Honor here is somewhat ironic of
course; she has "lost her honor" in her affair with Captain Hawdon, and what
honor she receives as Sir Leicester Dedlock's wife is all based on her
falsehood. However, she is able to regain some sense of honor in her final
acts. She refuses to acknowledge Esther publicly in order to protect her
daughter; she sends Rosa off to protect her maid; she leaves the safety of
the Dedlock home to protect her husband; she shows some devotion to the
memory of Hawdon in both the response to his handwriting and her choosing
to die near his grave. In a sense, by these acts Honoria redeems herself and
4Dickens also raises this issue in Turveydrop, who is all deportment and no feelings. His
behavior, his exploitation of first his son, and then Caddy Jellyby, are judged immoral.
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her honor, and by removing herself to avoid the possibility of further
contaminating society, she becomes a martyr.
Her fall is precipitated by a series of (commercial) exchanges of her
image. As a result, Honoria Dedlock, who has hidden behind a solid,
implacable exterior, loses her own sense of value, and becomes merely an
object for the consumption of others: "her name is in these many mouths"
(665). Others negotiate her value on the open market: in the cost of the
"Galaxy" collection, in the bribes and tips which Tulkinghorn pays to collect
information against her, in Guppy's feeble attempt to turn his knowledge to
profit by marrying Esther. She moves from one image-bank, the noble
gallery of Dedlock portraits, to another, and in the process, in the destruction
of her "aura," she loses whatever sense she had of herself.
But she is also capable of "reproduction" herself, in her illicit affair with
Captain Hawdon and the subsequent "production" of Esther, who signifies
the "flood" which Sir Leicester fears in physical, sexual terms, but whose self-
denying nature represents the possibility of another form of control — the
invisible control of ideology. Esther in many ways is both the victim and
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heroine of the middle class: its values have raised her, oppressed her,
shaped her. While none of the middle class men in the novel are seen as
heroic or strong (generally, they are depicted as childlike in different ways),
Esther represents the safe alternative: the woman in charge who denies her
power, willingly stepping back to hand over the keys.
As a "reproduction," Esther represents both similarity and difference.
Despite her narrative self-deprecation, she shares her mother's beauty. But
she also represents a moral strength which her mother apparently lacked.
Driven by duty over desire, she sacrifices herself to the needs of everyone
around her rather than considering her own. As the living sign of her
mother's desire, she remains marked by it, until her own scars protect both
herself and her mother from public discovery. Esther's face, much like her
mother's portrait, also is “reproduced,” a commodity which Guppy refers to as
the "image imprinted on my art" (361), by which he hopes to profit in
revealing her relation to Lady Dedlock. By analogy, Esther's face becomes
equated with an engraving. She has been etched by her mother's identity,
which includes her adulterous past, her deceitful present, her susceptibility to
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desire, and her vulnerability to the patriarchal order/law. Despite these
handicaps, or perhaps because of them, Esther is able to prove that being a
lady (as opposed to a Lady) consists of behavior and morals, rather than
position or appearance.
At the same time that reproductions threaten to over run the world,
Benjamin argues that they also serve to make the world more
understandable and controllable.
One can not longer view [great works] as the
productions of individuals; they have become collective
images, so powerful that capacity to assimilate them is
related to the condition of reducing them in size. In the
final effect, the mechanical methods of reproduction are
a technology of miniaturization and help man to a degree
of mastery over the works without which they no longer
are useful. (212)
Lady Dedlock's power, privilege and potent secret are contained and thus
rendered impotent against the stronger forces of middle-class society.
Esther's re-telling of her story itself is a "reproduction" which has this effect:
the reduction of her experiences into a comprehensible, manageable form.
Containment and reduction are key here, as Susan Stewart notes about what
she calls the narrative of the miniature.
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The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood
and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby
manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is
domesticated and protected from contamination. It
marks the pure body, the inorganic body of the machine
and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death.
(69)
Esther can both reclaim and reframe her mother's story; Dickens can both
decry and mourn the lost past.
Esther first encounters Lady Dedlock as a disembodied voice asking,
"Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?" (228). She and Ada have
found some protection from a sudden storm on the Dedlock estate. Ada
believes it is Esther's own voice; when Esther turns to look she admits, "I
had never heard the voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in
the same strange way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind
innumerable pictures of myself." The "innumerable pictures" suggest that
images are not merely the reflection of solid, eternal objects outside the
body, but are themselves dependable for presence on the individual
perceiver. Images themselves, pictures, are decidedly silent, voiceless. But
they are given "voice" or narrative by the viewer, just as here the voice
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provides first access/first reading to the image, the face. It is Esther's desire
to find the mother behind the voice that influences her sight. It is strange
that Esther sees not so much a mirror reflection, a single image of herself,
but "innumerable pictures," suggesting reproduction — here, sexual, not
mechanical.
The lodge in which Ada and Esther take refuge from the storm
approximates a camera obscura: a dark room into which the light of the
outside world is allowed to enter for the sake of spectacle. The scene is
decidedly Romantic, in part by virtue of its suggestion of this viewing room, a
common element in Romantic experiences of nature.5 The storm is read as
a show, one that is both "grand to see" and, by analogy, suggestive:
It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the
trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke;
5 To view Lower Rydal Falls, the tourist] had to be led by a guide past Rydal Hall down a
short path to a small summer house of rubble stone dating from 1668.... Here in an
interior kept darkened for effect, the tourist at last removed a shutter in the window to
see the falls appearing exactly, as we remember Gilpin saying, “like a picture in a
frame.” Indeed, the effect was so convincingly pictorial that it made the entire scene of
the falls seem what later tourists called dioramic. ... To see Rydal Lower Falls was to
step into a diorama, camera obscura, or gigantic Claude glass able to change the bridge
and even crossing peasants into purely aesthetic effects, into an illusion of workaday life
as “animation.” (Liu 88-9)
See also n. 73 (547-8). I am grateful to Katie Mills for pointing out this reference.
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and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning;
and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers
by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider
how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest
flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured
from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make
creation new again. (228)
The passage shifts Esther's observation from objective to blatantly
subjective, trained, as it were, by both romantic ideology and the traditions of
the gothic novel. In particular, Dickens suggests a retreat from a Victorian,
scientific way of knowing to an earlier perception, consistent perhaps with the
ideology contemporary to the novel's setting. The analogy to the camera
obscura calls attention to a particular way of reading a visual scene: that of
framing and separating it from its "natural" position. This scene — in a room
which is not a room (it is outside the domestic sphere, in nature rather than in
a house), in a particularly dramatic environment (the storm), calls such
attention to itself. Observation, then, is not merely about external facts, but
about what a scene means, here accomplished by the peculiar setting, the
use of personification of the wind and its subsequent allusion to some sort of
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supernatural power, and by the borrowing from theology and romantic
ideology.
While at key moments like this Esther seems to attempt to step, like a
photographer, behind a screen of neutrality, interposing the machinery of her
observation between herself and the world she observes, she can not
eschew the comforts of the soft focus and pre-packaged perceptions of the
Romantic. This contrasts sharply with Inspector Bucket's way of seeing the
world in a chilling, sharp light, one obviously connected to the harshest early
uses of photography: the mug shot and secret surveillance.6 Bucket's
observation is clearly associated with death: "his ghostly manner of
appearing" (275), and his "face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on
his little finger" (277). Esther's observations, in contrast, seem intent on
bringing things back to life. Arguably a precurser to Sherlock Holmes — that
6"Two characteristics that distinguish Mr. Bucket came to be shared by photographers: first,
his social mobility — he can appear at all levels of society from opium den to ducal mansion,
and second, the quality of his vision, which is instantaneous, but also permanent, or
photographic. The lens of his regard is functional and asocial" (Haworth-Booth 20).
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137
"observing machine"7 — Bucket seems to mount "a high tower in his mind,
and looks out far and wide" (673), exceeding mere human capacity, while
Esther's perception remains lodged in her clearly vulnerable body, her sight
limited to immediate surroundings. Bucket's observations are distinctly
mechanical, whether he is "taking" Mr. Snagsby's portrait or catching Jo with
the focused light of his bull's eye lantern — "Jo stands amazed in the disc of
light, like a ragged figure in a magic-lanthorn,8 trembling to think that he has
offended against the law in not having moved on far enough" (280-1).
Esther's are always undermined by her obvious fallibility, connected to her
conventionalized feminine frailty.
In many ways, Esther's illness points to her limits as a narrator: it was
brought on by her feminine devotion to the contagious Caddy, which led
7“A Scandal in Bohemia." Thomas details how Bucket, like Holmes, is described "in terms
which call to mind a photographic mechanism.
In the person of Mr. Bucket, photography is implicitly represented not simply as an
instrument for artistic representation or as a remarkable scientific achievement, but as a
technology designed for surveillance and control, a technique with which to arrest its
subject. (138-139)
8The spelling of lanthorn, with its reference to folk etymology, may be an attempt to soften
the mechanical elements of Bucket, making him appear more like the specter or monster of
folk tales. Early lanterns were made of horn rather than glass.
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138
Esther to place another's well-being above her own; it forces her to see only
indirectly, employing Caddy as a go-between to observe Ada from behind a
curtain (see 391); it causes her to become what she has been taught to see
herself as — unattractive and, therefore, outside of desire. As narrator,
Esther is blinded by her involvement with others and her own desires; she
fails to see (the direction of Jarndyce’s desire, the intention of Woodcourt's
devotion) as often as she sees. Conventional notions of a woman's place
constrain the freedom of her vision. Here Crary's point about the body as
determining what is seen takes on the gender issue that he ignores: it is
because she can only see as a woman, that Esther remains a limited
observer.
Ironically it is these characteristics that makes Esther seem to fit
Audrey Jaffe's understanding of what distinguishes the Victorian omniscient
narrator:
While expressing a distinctively Victorian anxiety about
knowledge, then, omniscient narration is also in the
business of constructing the knowledge that shapes
Victorian ideologies, affirming for readers what appear to
be truths of character and public life. Omniscient
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139
narration thus serves both "personal" and "impersonal"
functions and projects both individual and collective
fantasies. A subject's self-effacement enables his or her
participation in a larger, cultural gaze, while the
construction of others as subjects enables a narrator to
imagine, at least temporarily, eluding that gaze. (9)
Esther tries to sustain this double position, in essence trying to remain safe
from the detached vision of Bucket and the law. Lady Dedlock, having lost
her "aura," her distance, loses her ability to elude the "gaze." Caught by its
accusations, she must perish. Esther's acquiescence to her role as a
vulnerable female seems to keep her protected from the full force of Bucket's
vision — rendering her part in Bucket's pursuit of her mother little more than
that of a passive on-looker in a dream.
From Narrative Painting__________
If Esther's first encounter with her mother suggests the camera
obscura, their final meeting participates in another image repertoire, that of
narrative Victorian domestic genre paintings. These have their connection to
photography as well, in the conventionalized poses for individual and family
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140
portraits and the "narrative" photographs, often made of composite images,
which told similar tales of wifely duty, sentimentalized joys and sorrows, and
moral failings. As many theorists argue (including Barthes and Metz), we
have come to associate photographs with the family. In Dickens1 day,
photographs for both private, familial use and those for public consumption
and sale focused on the family as the site of both moral and social
achievement.
Esther's discovery of her dead mother occurs in a dreamlike fog. "I
have the most confused impressions of that walk," she tells us.
I recollect. . . that the stained house fronts put on
human shapes and looked at me; that the great water-
gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head, or
in the air; and that the unreal things were more
substantial than the real. (712-3)
The emphasis here is on the imagination; in contrast to Bucket's
professional pursuit, Esther's is driven by emotion, and her perceptions are
thus fanciful and idealized rather than harshly realistic. Finally Esther and
Bucket arrive at the graveyard:
. . . I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and
stones, hemmed in by filthy houses, with a few dull lights
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141
in their windows, and on whose walls a thick humidity
broke out like a disease. On the step at the gate,
drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed
and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity
and horror, a woman lying .... She lay there, with one
arm creeping round a bar of the iron gate, and seeming
to embrace it.
The woman, of course, is Lady Dedlock, in the borrowed clothes of Jenny,
the bricklayer's wife. The image illustrator Hablot K. Browne devises, of the
arched gateway and the prone
woman (fig. 1), predicts the stuff of
contemporary narrative paintings, like
the final image in Augustus Egg's
1858 series, now known as Past and
Present Egg's depiction of the
arches near the river, "the last refuge
of the homeless sin, vice, and
beggary of London" (qtd. in Casteras
137), is suggested by the arched
gateway in Browne's illustration.
i * / 1 j i * * ^ » ‘ j V 1
' vr'J
Figure 1 Hablot K. Browne: Morning
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The outrage which met Egg's series — which depicts the fall of a
married woman, who is banished from the security of her husband's home
and the care of her small children, to this dismal scene, where she cradles
her bastard child — suggests the problems Dickens knew he would
encounter in depicting
Lady Dedlock for a
readership who refused
to look straight at the
implications of female
desire. Egg's series
has a particular
poignancy, appearing
as it did in the year following passage of new divorce laws which made it
easier to obtain a divorce through civil courts and rather than by Act of
Parliament. It depicted what might have been seen as a just cause for
divorce, a wife's infidelity.
H P "
n
j y
> w m s m m m
*
?
* ** * * , * r* ■
I H H n
Figure 2 Augustus Leopold Egg: Past and Present III
(1858)
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143
The adulteress is a common subject of narrative painting of Lady
Dedlock's day. As a threat to the security and sanctity of the home and
family, adultery represents the greatest of Victorian evils — the idealized
woman become flesh, the image of purity tainted. Ironically, Bleak House
capitalizes on the popular abhorrence and interest in condemning the
adulteress, while also raising significant doubts about the possibility of any
stable notion of family. There is more than one house which is "bleak" in the
novel, by virtue of dysfunctional families unable to educate, protect, or
provide sustenance, whether physical, moral, or emotional. "Family" in Bleak
House is often no more than a financial or legal arrangement, as for the
Dedlocks or for the wards of the Jamdyce case; the novel chronicles the re
construction of an idealized family picture at Esther and Alan Woodcourt's
home.
The burden of securing family values is, of course, laid on the women,
and this novel contrasts sentimentalized, suffering mothers of various sorts
(from Mrs. Rouncewell to Mrs. Bagnet) with problematic, if often dangerous
ones: Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardingle, and Lady Dedlock. The quality of their
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144
motherhood is measured by their relations with their children. We know from
first meeting Lady Dedlock that something is amiss: she is seen as childless.
The Ghost Walk comes to symbolize the missing child, and the chilling effect
of a childless marriage is seen everywhere. The missing child at Chesney
Wold9 is counter balanced by the dead child Esther encounters at the
bricklayer's. Ironically, it is Jenny, the bricklayer's wife, in whose clothes
Lady Dedlock finally disguises herself, at last assuming the role they share,
of a woman who has lost her infant child in part due to social forces beyond
her control (for Lady Dedlock, the claims of social morality and status; for
Jenny, poverty and domestic abuse). At either end of the social scale, then,
the family is dissolute, dissolving. It leaves the field open for the middle class
to rescue society by somehow reinforcing the family. This is seen in Caddy
Jellyby,1 0 the Bagnets, the Rouncewells, and later, Esther's own family. It is
odd that Esther's narration doesn't mention her own children's names. She
®There are several missing children: Esther, George Rouncewell, a Dedlock heir.
10Caddy is treated with humor and pity by Dickens, but she suggests the painting series
"Woman's Mission," in her devotion to her husband, child, and siblings, and as such, a
corrective to her mother's sense of her “mission" being outside the home.
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145
must have children for the novel's resolution to work but these seem a late
add-on for Dickens, who, while willing to record the evidence of passion for
Lady Dedlock, takes a rather prudish approach to Esther, perhaps to keep
her distance and superior moral presence intact. He seems unwilling to give
Esther a sex life, and gave her name to another, sickly child (Caddy’s).
Only after the bad mother has been both made sympathetic and fully
punished, and Lady Dedlock dies, can Jarndyce and Jarndyce reach its end,
and domestic tranquillity be restored. The new Bleak House, into which
Esther and Alan move, represents the epitome of British comfort:
.. . a cottage, quite a rustic cottage of doll’s rooms; but
such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beautiful, with
such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with
water sparkling away into the distance, here all over
hung with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill;
at its nearest point glancing through a meadow by the
cheerful town, where cricket-players were assembling in
bright groups, and a flag was flying from a white tent that
rippled in the sweet west wind. (751)
This is merely a "doll's" house rather than a real place, a cottage in keeping
with Britain's myth of rustic traditions and the rural past, with a "smiling
country" surrounding it, industry reduced to a picturesque "humming mill" (no
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146
Wa! Taylors here!), al! “cheerful" and "sweet," and mounted by the flag flying
over a white tent — a world of eternal summers.
The ending is a false one, a pretense of an escape from the gritty
views of Inspector Bucket and the issues raised by the novel. This is a
nostalgic, watercolor world offered to a readership thrilled but exhausted by
photographic reality. Like the dying Richard, destroyed by the final outcome
of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the reader also wants to go "to that pleasant
country where the old times are" (761). It's no wonder that Dickens couldn't
directly mention photography in this restoration project; it would have made
the final Bleak House an impossible construction.1 1 While implying the new
technology through sudden flashes of recognition described in visual set
111 t is telling that there is no attempt to provide illustrations for the final scenes of the novel.
For illustrations severely limit the range of the reader's visual imagination as it comes
into contact with the author's. Often, indeed, the author's visual imagination sprints
ahead of the illustrations, suggesting more than the plates actually record and yet
tempting the reader to accept the plates as an accurate and adequate representation of
how people and events in the novel “really looked." Though originally intended to help
readers to visualize novels, illustrations can thus lull the reader's visualizing faculties.
Here phenomenology provides corroboration; for the act of perceiving (as one perceives
an illustration in a text) is less free than the act of imagining (as one imagines a pictorial
rendering). (Torgovnick 93-4)
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pieces, exploring the effects of (mechanical) reproduction, and
problematizing both the subject and object of vision, observation, and
perspective in ways made more complex by the existence of the
photographic camera, Dickens recognized that photography threatened his
retreat, and potentially limited imaginative escapes for both him and his
readers. Photographs could only show things as they are, or things as they
once were; they could not bridge the gap to help the present redeem itself
by recreating the past.
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148
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bede, Cuthbert. Photographic Pleasures. London: T. McLean, 1854.
Benjamin, Walter. "A Short History of Photography." Trachtenberg 199-216.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Blow-Up. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Vanessa Redgrave, David
Hemmings, Sarah Miles. MGM-UA, 1966.
Casteras, Susan. Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art.. London:
Associate University Press, 1987.
Cherry, Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. New York: Bantam, 1985.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1977.
— . Oliver Twist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
. Pickwick Papers. New York: New American Library, 1964.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso Books, 1991.
Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth. "Photography." Trachtenberg 39-68.
Gillett, Paula. Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
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149
Haworth-Booth, Mark. "The Dawning of an Age: Chauncy Hare Townshend:
Eyewitness." The Golden Age of British Photography 1839-1900. Ed.
Mark Haworth-Booth. London: Aperture, 1984. 11-21.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell Uiversity Press, 1985.
Jaffe, Audrey. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of
Omniscience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1989.
Metz, Christian. "Photography and Fetish." Ed. Carol Squiers. The Critical
Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography. Seattle: Bay Press,
1990. 155-164.
Newton, Sir William. “Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and Its
Relations to the Arts.” The Journal of the Photographic Society. No. 1
(March 3, 1853). 6-8.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1993.
Talbot, H. Fox. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans, 1844.
Thomas, Ronald R. "Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and
Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction."
Eds. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. Victorian Literature and the
Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995. 134-168.
Torgovnick, Marianna. The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James,
Lawrence, and Woolf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT:
Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
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150
The Case of the Missing Photograph:
Great Expectations
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a
photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
(Barthes 6)
It has been said that "not he who is ignorant of writing
but ignorant of photography will be the illiterate of the
future." (Benjamin 215)
“ As I never saw my father or my mother," Pip tells us at the start of
Great Expectations, "and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their
days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding
what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones" (23).
The opening scene in the churchyard provides a model of interpreting
language and visual images free from any limits that concrete evidence, like
a photograph, might place. The allusion to photography counterbalances
Pip’s fanciful narrative with a model of the real, implying that just knowing
about photography, as Pip does, is sufficient to validate his observations. Pip
tries to carve out a niche for his narrative safe from photographic proof, but
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151
Dickens’s parenthetical attempt at avoidance is a faint-hearted sidestep. The
novel invites a reading which takes into account the already pervasive
technology of photography.
The photograph missing from Great Expectations is conspicuous in its
absence. After all, the novel appeared in Dickens's magazine, All the Year
Round, from December 1860 to August 1861, during the years in which,
according to Mark Haworth-Booth, “Photography grew to be part of social
life."
If 1851 changed the climate of opinion about
photography in Britain, encouraging a new group of
talented individuals to experiment with the medium as
amateurs and professionals (or a mixture of both), 1862
spelled the end of that particular phase and the triumph
of photography as an industry....The practice of
photography began to polarize. The age of the
avowedly amateur began ... (Origins n. pag.)
Those amateurs included such major talents as Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret
Cameron, and Lady Clementina Hawarden, all of whom acknowledged a
connection between photography and literature. A week after his first
introduction to photography, Carroll satirically applied the concept of
developing the latent image, the process at the heart of photography, to
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152
writing. In the story “Photography Extraordinary,” a photographer records the
thoughts of a feeble-minded young man on a specially prepared paper, which
could then be developed so that the thoughts become more powerful.
Photographs themselves always suggest narrative, whether in the
portrait of an author holding a book to “ tell” his identity, the record of an
event, or in an elaborately staged enactment of a story. Carroll, like other
amateurs, enjoyed arranging costumed sitters in miniature dramas; his child
subjects, in particular, loved to dress up. Cameron took the practice a step
further by illustrating The Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson (himself
her frequent portraiture subject). In contrast, Hawarden’s photographs,
“ostensibly portraits” but full of mirrors and windows which suggest the
process of reproduction itself, reflect, according to one critic, “a psychological
condition similar to that expressed in the writing of the period, most notably
by the Brontes and George Eliot” (Clarke, Photograph .51 n). Each of these
photographers took the narrative power of the medium to new heights.
Photographs easily found their way into the works of leading writers
other than Dickens, including Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860).
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153
Like Great Expectations, this novel is concerned with problems of identity
and identification, problems which might have been easily solved with
photographic evidence. Still, the writer who gets the most attention from
photo-historians is Dickens himself, as in this description of the period from
Haworth-Booth:
The photographic elements in Dickens's prose style, and
his interest in the vision and attributes of the detective,
which in turn exhibit in his novels decidedly photographic
qualities, are part of any wider appreciation of the role
played by the medium in nineteenth-century English
society. (Origins n. pag.)
These “photographic elements” appear in the novels almost against
Dickens’s will. Great Expectations, with its opening dismissal of “ the days of
photographs,” provides a fine example of what appears to be Dickens’s
anxiety about representation in the face of the new and expanding form.
By the time the novel appeared, the issues of identity and evidence
which lie at the heart of Great Expectations had already become associated
with photographs. As in Bleak House, Dickens locates the ability to take
likenesses in the representatives of the law. Instead of employing a detective
figure, like Bucket, Dickens here represents that power in the lawyer,
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154
Jaggers, whose collection of death masks provides a thin disguise for the
identification and classification of criminals and the insane being mounted in
photographs (the same allusion which lies beneath the surface of The
Woman in White). Jaggers’s ability to bend the letter of the law to
accommodate his own judgment (as Pip on page one bends the letters on
the tombstone) raises issues about fixing any truth, including that of identity.
Dickens thus examines a new concern for Victorians: the fluid nature of
identity. By rejecting photographic evidence, Dickens privileges fancy and
feeling as establishing grounds for belief/faith, rejecting mere fact as being
indeterminate.
Thus several critical issues arise from the missing photograph in Great
Expectations: issues of narrative strategies, of identity, of evidence. All the
issues reside inside a geography that can be approached and at least
roughly charted by applying modern theories of photographs to Great
Expectations.
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155
Missing Parents ______________
In the second part of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes attempts to
define the "essence of the Photograph" using an 1898 picture of his mother,
as a child, in a conservatory or "Winter Garden." Barthes describes the
photograph in detail; however, he does not include it among the illustrations
in the book, which he explains in a parenthetical paragraph:
(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It
exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an
indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of
the "ordinary"; it cannot in any way constitute the visible
object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in
the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest
your studium: period clothes, photogeny; but in it, for
you, no wound.) (73)
Studium, Barthes explains earlier in the book, "doesn't mean, at least not
immediately, 'study,' but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of
general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity" (26).
The studium is associated with education, culture, politeness, the average
effect. In contrast, the "wound" of which he speaks, which breaks the
studium, Barthes elsewhere calls the punctum: "A photograph's punctum is
that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (27).
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156
It is the cause of sympathy or tenderness (45). The word "punctum" "suits
me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation" (26); it is,
in Barthes’ discussion, the stimulus for rhetorical response, for language.
The detail from which the punctum "shoots out" (26), while not necessarily
part of the intention of the photographer, "occurs in the field of the
photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and
delightful" (47). In a sense it is in excess to what the photographer has seen,
and solely exists as a product of the spectator’s interpretation.
At the beginning of Barthes's
discussion of the Winter Garden
photograph, the text does offer a
photograph, by Nadar, of a white
haired woman with piercing eyes,
captioned, "The Artist's Mother (or
Wife)" (fig. 1). There is only slight
reference to this specific picture in
the text; it is a floating signifier, awaiting further identification (the caption
Figure 1 Nadar: "The Artist's
Mother (or Wife)" (1890)
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157
itself is uncertain as to the subject’s identity). Its placement in the text
surreptitiously invites one to read "the artist" as Barthes himself; to substitute
this photo of the adult mother for the missing image of the mother-as-child, to
read into the elderly face the traces of the young one. The image serves as
an ideal version of Barthes's own mother, whose death has caused him to
peruse her collection of photographs. Barthes avoids discussing the
relationship between text and photographic illustration, of caption to image,
even though he offers a caption and commentary to a missing photograph,
and no commentary on the photograph he does present (and its enigmatic
caption). We have to accept Barthes's reading of the "text" of the Winter
Garden photograph, robbed of any opportunity to contradict it.
Because his definition of the "essence" of photography, depending as
it does on a missing photograph, divorces itself from the visual, operating
without benefit of concrete evidence or illustration, Barthes challenges the
narrative capacity of photographs themselves. Art historian Michael Fried
notes that the "structural nonreproducibility" of the Winter Garden image
defines photographs "as wholly private and in that sense antitheatrical: as
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158
though for Barthes the essence of the Photograph consists precisely in a
denial of the ‘exhibition value’ that Walter Benjamin associated with the
photographic" (283n). But no photograph is ever “ wholly private," since its
mobility makes possible its public consumption. Even without “ exhibiting” the
photograph, Barthes makes public use of it; the “essence” of the photograph
depends upon what its presence (or even a suggestion of its presence)
invokes, not merely on the content of a given image. Instead of the
photograph itself, he offers what W.J.T. Mitchell has called an “imagetext”1 or
what Marianne Hirsch calls a “prose picture”:
a verbal overlay hides the image from our view even
while disclosing its structure and effect: the multiplicity
and mutuality of looking, the relational network that
composes all family pictures and the stab of recognition
that selects this one among a plurality of choices.
Writing the image accomplishes even more in this scene
of mourning: it undoes the objectification of the still
photograph and thereby takes it out of the realm of
stasis, immobility, mortification — what Barthes calls “ flat
1 Mitchell also uses the term ekphrasis which he defines as “the verbal representation of
visual representation.” About Camera Lucida he writes, “The relation of the photographs to
Barthes’s text is, then, that of labyrinth and thread .... His role as a writer is not to master
the photos, but to surrender himself as captivated observer, as naive subject of the
idolatrous magic of images” (301). And yet, Barthes usurps the photographs’ narrative
power in his text.
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159
death” — into fluidity, movement, and thus, finally, life.
(Hirsch 3-4)
Writing about a photograph brings (back) to “life” what photographs
themselves condemn to permanent stasis.
What Barthes writes is defined by its being about a photograph, a
commodity well known to his readers. They bring to his description their
imaginations — what pictures they have of their own parents as children,
what understanding they have of discovering the treasures of family history
— coupled with their sense of how photographs operate in culture. Barthes
confirms, contradicts, or builds upon that knowledge; his musings seem
more concrete because of his reference to a particular photograph. While
this system may work with other forms of topical reference (to a specific
product or brand name, for example, or to a well known event), photography
exaggerates this factor. It is, in itself, the pretense of reality, always attesting,
as Barthes himself argues, "that what I see has indeed existed."
In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain
past moment) is never metaphoric; and in the case of
animated beings, their life as well, except in the case of
photographing corpses; and even so: if the photograph
then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to
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160
speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living
image of a dead thing. (Barthes 78)
As metaphor, the photograph conjures up these associations; even if the
concrete image is not present, its effect is to invoke "the presence of the
thing (at a certain past moment)."
Barthes's missing image helps explain the effect of the photograph
missing from the opening of Great Expectations. Dickens's reference allows
readers to date the actions of the novel in the past,2 but it serves other
functions as well. First and foremost, it "borrows" an aura of authenticity by
mentioning photography. This is an age of photography, Pip implies: would
(could?) I lie to you?
Barthes’s missing Winter Garden photograph also concerns the same
subject as Dickens’s missing photograph: the missing parent(s). John Tagg
writes,
2 Pip's parents' deaths needed to be set early enough to allow Pip to reach his thirties by the
end of the novel and the “present day" (1860). Hence, the parents would have to have died
"before the days of photographs." The fixed photograph was announced in Britain in 1839;
portraits were popularized in the 1850s. There could have been no other "likeness" other
than photographs made of Pip's parents because they were not of the class to have had
their portraits painted.
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The trauma of Barthes's mother's death throws Barthes
back on a sense of loss which produces in him a longing
for a pre-linguistic certainty and unity — a nostalgic and
regressive phantasy, transcending loss, on which he
founds his idea of photographic realism: to make
present what is absent or, more exactly, to make it
retrospectively real — a poignant “reality one can no
longer touch.” What exceeds representation, however,
cannot, by definition, be articulated. (4)
This helps define Dickens’s tactic as well. Certainly, Pip comes to the
graveyard to visit his dead family out of longing; as the novel develops, we
recognize his persistent search for “parents” to replace his abusive sister and
impotent brother-in-law. This is his “ wound,” the punctum which stimulates
rhetorical response; Pip sees beyond the missing photograph to find images
that satisfy his needs. But while the psychological quest may be aimed at
regaining what Tagg calls a “pre-linguistic certainty,” the method relies solely
on language; Pip must find himself in his own words, in his own making
sense of his expectations and their consequences. A photograph of his
parents, could it ever be found, would provide evidence both of who they
were and who he himself is. Without it, the author and his narrator become
secure in the knowledge of their own freedom to invent. This avoidance of
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evidence defines Pip’s struggles: he misses all the clues he lays out so
clearly for his reader (like the indications that Estella does not plan on ever
marrying him), escaping, in a sense, from the authority of the perspective of
others or from the facts themselves. In addition, having not seen a
photograph of his parents, proof of both their “real” existence and his own
lineage (as shown by resemblance), Pip can reject his humble beginnings
and attempt to construct his own ideal “ family.”
By denying the photographic image, Dickens removes the limitations
on the imagination and representation which photography implies. He can
still employ fairy-tale figures like Miss Havisham and Magwitch while
validating the story as having a real referent; although his parents lived "long
before the days of photographs,” Pip himself does not. Dickens's reference
evokes the authenticity which photography implies, while avoiding its
command.3
3|n a similar vein, Cadava discusses Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History,"
in which Benjamin "conceives of history in the language of photography" and the function of
the photographic metaphor to critique history's "versions of a realism that establishes its
truth by evoking the authority of so-called facts’ (85).
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Much attention has been paid (by Peter Brooks and others) to the way
in which Pip reads his parents’ tombstones — "The shape of the letters ...
gave me an odd idea" — but little has been directed towards the missing
photograph, beyond the chronological reference. In one of the rare instances,
Garrett Stewart writes,
[T]he analogy between photographic representation and
narrative textuality is often deeply ingrained in Victorian
narrative, where its cultural pervasiveness may be
measured by how easily it can be marginalized within a
given text.... the boy must resort to a false reading of
their features from the incised lines on their tombstone,
even as Dickensian mimesis at large quite successfully
outdoes the photographic by giving us moving images of
characters read into being from mere inscriptions, page
after page. (351)
While Stewart resorts, as critics often do in studying the visual qualities of
Dickens’s texts, to referring to film ( by emphasizing “moving images”) rather
than remaining with the still image Dickens himself knew, he does see how
the analogy between photo and text becomes a competition, dominated by
Dickens’s need to “outdo” the photographic. Dickens poses the missing
photograph as offering a different sort of knowledge than the one Pip devises
by reading not only the words on the stones, but the shapes of the letters,
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"the character and turn of the inscription," the dimensions of the stones, and
their arrangement in the churchyard. The knowledge derived from
photographs apparently doesn't allow for "odd ideas" or "childish
conclusions"; Dickens implies that such mechanical representation too
carefully directs and can stifle the imagination.
As Chapter One of Great Expectations develops, Dickens makes
obvious the differences between merely seeing facts (as a photograph would
present) and allowing visual clues to stimulate the "fancy": between
identifying the thing itself, in contrast to the impressions invoked by the thing,
impressions trained by a previous knowledge of reading and interpreting.
Dickens sees these two ways of knowing as separate and in opposition; at
the same time, he realizes how one stimulates the other. Here is Pip's first
view of Magwitch: "A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his
leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied
round his head" (24). Beyond "fearful," this describes the convict in merely
objective, visual terms. These are the facts, what might be seen in a
photograph. But Dickens goes on:
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A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in
mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung
by nettles, and tom by briars; who limped, and shivered,
and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in
his head as he seized me by the chin.
Now, Pip interprets what he has seen, and develops a story from it, based on
a vocabulary derived from fairy tales. The short, fragmented phrases of the
first two sentences of the paragraph begin to flow together, as the description
gathers energy. Each detail seems to engender the next: if one is "stung by
nettles," one must also have been "torn by briars." The description moves
from passivity to activity, from appearance to narrative. Later, it moves from
natural to supernatural, as Pip describes Magwitch retreating across the
marshes:
At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in
both his arms — clasping himself, as if to hold himself
together — and limped towards the low church wall. As I
saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and
among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he
looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands
of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their
graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.
Dickens seems to juggle conflicting perspectives, in a sense calling
upon the photographic as a way of validating the fancy precisely at that
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moment of Pip’s “ first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of
things.” “Fancy,” the term Dickens uses on his first page, suggests
Coleridge’s definition in Biographia Literaria, “a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and
modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the
word CHOICE.... [I]t must receive all its materials ready made from the law
of association” (167). Without an existing photograph to limit his imagination,
Pip is free to “ modify” his memory to suit his desires.4 Here, then, seems to
be Dickens’s modus operandi: fancy works on the material of the real world
to provide fodder for his imagination. But the “real world” exists without
locus, and solely as logos.
Freed from the limitations he supposes in the photographic model,
Dickens gives only a pretense of visual concreteness. James Kincaid, in
describing the problems of adapting Dickens to film, notes that in the novels,
"Often, when we expect description, we receive instead interpretation,
4 “Fancy” also suggests the conflict Dickens examines in Hard Times, between the
Gradgrind school of facts and Sleary’s world of fancy.
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hammering us with the point that all representation is interpretation" (50).
Dickens, Kincaid argues, pushes representation "into the realm of untamed
and fanciful interpretation and [defies] any sort of neutral visualizing."
[Dickens's] figurative language amounts to a radical
relativism in terms of perspective, an indication that the
best we can do in the way of seeing amounts to a poor
approximation.... we can observe how apparently
explicit descriptions are not allowed to run on very long
without an interruption which has the effect of blurring
the image. (50, 52)
This would not be fully possible in the presence of photographic evidence; in
addition, it suggests that even the supposedly exact “pencil of nature,”
photographs, can themselves be blurred since “ seeing” itself “amounts to a
poor approximation.”5
Dickens’s strategy, though it seems to deny a photographic
perspective, in fact mirrors the paradox the new technology presented.
5 “Blurring” was the great criticism directed against Cameron’s photographic style, yet its
most compelling characteristic. ‘The ‘out of focus’ aspect of her work was intentional.... In a
letter to Sir John Herschel, she insisted that her style of focusing was deliberate, and not
because of lack of ability: ‘What is focus — and who has the right to say what focus is the
legitimate focus?’” (Roberts 55). Like Hawarden, whose photographs are filled with windows
and mirrors, Cameron challenged notions of photographic representation as mere mimesis,
purposefully showing the “mirror” to be flawed for effect.
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Almost simultaneous with the initial belief in the photograph as factual
evidence came the fear of its providing a flawed reflection. "Some early
responses to the invention of photography ... suggest that the new
technologies encouraged a suspicion of appearances, rather than
unquestioning acceptance" (Wilkinson 276). This suspicion was fed by
certain photographic practices, such as combination printing, in which
several negatives were pieced together to depict a scene which never
existed anywhere in its entirety, and yet appeared in a print to be “real.” The
process developed to answer the need for different exposures times in
photographing landscapes, but later, particularly in the hands of Oscar G.
Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, it became a means for composing
often elaborate narratives. Perhaps the most controversial of these images
was Robinson’s 1858 Fading Away (fig. 2), depicting a dying girl surrounded
by grieving figures. The public, accepting the image’s “ truth,” generally
thought it inappropriate to photograph so painful a scene. When Robinson
admitted that the principal model “ was a fine healthy girl of about fourteen,
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169
Figure 2 H.P. Robinson: Fading Away
and the picture was done to see how near death she could be made to look,”
critics decried the photograph’s artificiality (qtd. in Newhall 76).6
Hence, even what appeared to be the most “accurate,” “ truthful,” and
“precise” mode of representation, photography, was regarded, even at its
inception, with doubt. The desire for exact reproductions of reality and the
faith in their veracity encountered an equally compelling desire to suspect
6 Robinson believed in the photograph as “the most perfect specimen of realism the world
could produce”; about literature he wrote, “When the novelist sets forth with his note-book
you know that he will bring home a bundle of untruths. When he sticks to his fireside, he has
a chance at least of inventing a probability: whereas, confronting the world with a hungry
eye, he sees all things in a wrong relation, and the result is not truth but ‘copy’” (92, 93).
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those reproductions. The conflict raised questions about every attempt at
mimesis.
In Great Expectations, Dickens purposefully backs away from that
conflict, firmly establishing his narrative within a pre-photographic culture.
Yet, like Roland Barthes’s refusal to reproduce the Winter Garden
photograph in Camera Lucida, Dickens’s effort only serves to remind the
reader (both in the 1860s, as photography gained influence, and now) of the
complex issues even a missing photograph can produce.
Identity Papers__________________
While Dickens avoids explicitly discussing a photograph or
photography as a practice, in The Woman in White Wilkie Collins associates
photography with an eccentric character, purposefully discrediting the form at
the same time he alludes to a variety of its contemporary uses. As a popular
novelist, like Dickens, Collins was himself much photographed, part of the
growing cult of celebrity commodified by photography. He sat for some of
the top photographers of the day and appeared in photographic cartes-de-
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visite. His portrait, taken by Cundall, Downes and Co. of New Bond Street,
appears as the frontispiece of the first one volume edition of The Woman in
White (Sampson Low, London 1861). According to Andrew Gasson, “ Collins
regarded photography with cynicism....[He] often regarded photographic
sittings as a necessary interruption to his work (122). Collins makes
reference to photography in several of his works, frequently with derision. In
The Moonstone, for example, he describes amateur photographers as “doing
justice without mercy on everybody’s face in the house” (63). Whereas the
mere mention of a photograph in Great Expectations helps establish the
authority/veracity of reality of Pip’s narrative, in The Woman in White the
association of photographs with static identification — of art objects, not
people — suggests their limits and falsehood (they are not the things
themselves).
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In Woman in White, Marion Halcombe describes Frederick Fairlie's
latest "caprice," "to keep two photographers incessantly employed on
producing sun-pictures of all the treasures and curiosities in his possession."7
One complete copy of the collection of photographs is to
be presented to the Mechanics1 Institution of Carlisle,
mounted on the finest cardboard, with ostentatious red-
letter inscriptions underneath. "Madonna and Child by
Raphael. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie,
Esquire." "Copper coin of the period of Tiglath Pileser.
In the Possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique
Rembrandt etching. Known all over Europe, as The
Smudge, from a printer's blot in the corner which exists
in no other copy. Valued at three hundred guineas. In
the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." Dozens of
photographs of this sort, and all inscribed in this manner,
were completed before I left Cumberland; and hundreds
more remain to be done. With this new interest to
occupy him, Mr. Fairlie will be a happy man for months
and months to come; and the two unfortunate
photographers will share the social martyrdom which he
has hitherto inflicted on his valet alone. (173)
These photographs serve several purposes in establishing Mr. Fairlie's
character and addressing central themes of the novel: they are part of his
7In The Golden Age of British Photography 1839-1900, Mark Haworth-Booth claims that the
description of Fairlie’s room is based on Dickens’s observations of the home of his friend,
Chauncy Hare Townshend, the first British collector of early photographs (apart from Prince
Albert), to whom Dickens dedicated Great Expectations.
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self-consumption; they express his attitudes towards class. They also raise
concerns about representation — which is the art object, which the copy? —
which reflect on the structure of the novel as a whole. They suggest a
hierarchy of representative forms — placing the individual achievement of a
Raphael or Rembrandt, or an etching valued unique due to human error,
above photography, which ranks low because it is produced by mere camera
operators, the “ two unfortunate photographers.” Most importantly, they posit
photography as a model of identification in a novel whose central plot
concerns the abyss which lies between appearance and identity (an issue
which is also central to Great Expectations). Proving identity — the central
mystery of (social) life — becomes so complex and many layered in The
Woman in White, that having discounted both the simple solution,
photography (or a related indexical form), and the far too subjective powers
of “instinct,” Collins offers instead a frightening, over-determined web of
texts.
Mr. Fairlie’s use of the technology to reproduce and thus make more
mobile his collection was one imagined by William Henry Fox Talbot in The
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Pencil of Nature: "the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China
might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make
a written inventory describing it in the usual way" (n. pag.). Talbot
immediately associates this use of photography with policing. “ And should a
thief afterwards purloin the treasures — " he continues, "if the mute
testimony of the picture were to be produced against him in court — it would
certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what the judge and jury might say
to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculations of those who possess legal
acumen."8 ‘Talbot lays claim to a new legalistic truth,” Alan Sekula writes,
“ the truth of an indexical rather than textual inventory. ... Only the
photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visual document of
ownership" (344).
Photographs of art objects out of reach of personal viewing, often
collected in volumes for purchase (though by those of higher rank and
8 The notion of photographs as substitutes for the real thing in art study persists, not only in
published books but also in practices like that of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles,
which maintains a “photo study” collection of images of art and architecture.
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income than the members of the Mechanics Institution), quickly became
common among the Victorians. In his own narrative, Fairlie explains,
At the end of June or the beginning of July, I was
reclining, in my usual state, surrounded by the various
objects of Art which I have collected about me to
improve the taste of the barbarous people in my
neighbourhood. That is to say, I had the photographs of
my pictures, and prints, and coins, and so forth, all about
me, which I intend, one of these days, to present (the
photographs, I mean, if the clumsy English language will
let me mean anything) — to present to the Institution at
Carlisle (horrid place!), with a view to improving the
tastes of the Members (Goths and Vandals to a man).
(301)
That slight confusion of original and photographic copy hints at Fairlie's later
confusion over the identity of his niece. The attitudes expressed in the
description — "clumsy English language ... horrid place! ... Goths and
Vandals to a man" — point out the subjective nature of Fairlie's narrative,
and by extension, of all narratives (as does Collins's structure as a whole,
with its layering of multiple narratives). Of course, the photographs
themselves would have been subjective as well, far from equal to the objects
themselves, particularly because they were produced by the "two unfortunate
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photographers" sharing Fairlie's "social martyrdom."9 The images show only
particular perspectives; photos can't reveal an object "in the round," nor
could photographs of the time capture, say, Raphael's colors. Thus the
photographs represent the objects, but are clearly not the objects themselves
— and representations are always subjective and interpretive, as each
narrative in the novel attests.
The clear location of The Woman in White in a photographic culture
(published in 1860, it is set on the eve of the Great Exhibition of 1851) helps
problematize its discussion of identity.1 0 Sir Percival Glyde’s true identity —
as illegitimate, as a forgerer — depends upon comparing two written
documents: the forged parish records and the hand-written copy (non
mechanical reproduction) kept by the meticulous vestry clerk. Laura's
9 Talbot argued for the advantages of photographing sculpture (as opposed to living sitters):
sculptures were easier to light and didn’t move. On the issue of subjectivity even when
photographing a sculpture, see Graham Clarke’s discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Apollo
(1988), a “portrait” closeup of a marble sculpture (Photograph 101ff).
10"[Mrs. Rubelle and her husband] had come from Lyons; and they had taken a house in
the neighbourhood of Leicester-square, to be fitted up as a boarding-house for foreigners,
who were expected to visit England in large numbers to see the Exhibition of 1851" (Collins,
The Woman in White 373).
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identity, compromised by her likeness to the mysterious Anne Catherick, is
not as easy to prove. Walter Hartright admits,
I gave up all hope of appealing to my recognition of
Laura, or to Marian's recognition of her, in proof of her
identity. If we had loved her less dearly, if the instinct
implanted in us by that love had not been far more
certain than any exercise of reasoning, far keener than
any process of observation, even we might have
hesitated, on first seeing her. The outward changes
wrought by the suffering and the terror of the past had
fearfully, almost hopelessly, strengthened the fatal
resemblance between Anne Catherick and herself. In
my narrative of events at the time of my residence in
Limmeridge House, I have recorded, from my own
observation of the two, how the likeness, striking as it
was when viewed generally, failed in many important
points of similarity when tested in detail. In those former
days, if they had both been seen together, side by side,
no person could for a moment have mistaken them one
for the other — as has happened often in the instances
of twins. I could not say this now. The sorrow and
suffering which I had once blamed myself for associating
even by a passing thought with the future of Laura
Fairlie, had set their profaning marks on the youth and
beauty of her face; and the fatal resemblance which I
had once seen and shuddered at seeing, in idea only,
was now a real and living resemblance which asserted
itself before my own eyes. (387)
Hartright privileges the knowledge provided by "instinct" over that gained by
"any process of observation," given that while Laura and Anne Catherick's
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appearances once differed "in many points of similarity when tested in
detail," after Laura's ordeal, the "fatal resemblance ... asserted itself before
my own eyes." Laura had become the picture of madness, unhappiness,
and rejection which had hitherto described her (unbeknownst to her) half
sister.
Hartright’s consideration of the “profaning marks” on Laura’s face,
which cause a “ fatal resemblance” to her half sister, the broken, mad Anne
Catherick, suggests an application of photography which Collins’s interests
must have led him to know: the use of photographs in police work (the police
employed civilian photographers from the 1840s onwards1 1 ), and in the
cataloguing of criminals and inmates of insane asylums. The catalogues
ostensibly arose from scientific interests. Darwin’s Origin of the Species
(1859) encouraged a search for traces of evolutionary evidence in
appearances, reviving an earlier interest in physiognomy (as posited by
Johann Kaspar Lavater, in Essays on Physiognomy in 1789) and phrenology
1 1 The use of specialized police photographers did not grow until much later, after 1901,
when fingerprints at crime scenes began to be recorded on film (Tagg 74-76).
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(formulated by Franz Joseph Gall at the beginning of the 19th century). Both
proposed to show “ the relation between the exterior and the interior —
between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it covers” (Lavater,
qtd. in Phillips 15). Phrenology in particular sought to establish the
connections between evolution, bestiality and criminal behavior.
Photography was often employed in support of these pseudo-sciences, with
complex motives. Darwin himself produced some disturbing work in his last
major book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872),
illustrated with photographs, including those by Oscar Gustave Rejlander
(best known for his combination printing) and Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne
(who used electric shock to create expressions). The “evidence” of
expression is highly contrived; Rejlander even photographed himself for
several of the images. However, despite their overt theatricality, the
photographs are, we are told, “ to be taken as ‘real’ or equivalent to real
persons.” Linda Haverly Rugg notes, “It is only when photography can be
taken as evidence of the real (equally expressive of the real) that it can be
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180
used in a scientific setting” (110). Darwin achieves the impression of
scientific objectivity by employing photographs, even though the expressions
they record are posed or imposed.
In 1856, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond presented his theories
on “ the peculiar application of photography to the delineation of
insanity” (Tagg 77): it could aid treatment (by offering pleasure
and interest to patients), provide a permanent record for analysis,
and serve as a means of rapid identification.
The value of the camera was extolled because the
optical and chemical processes of photography were
taken to designate a scientifically exploited but ‘natural’
mechanism producing ‘natural’ images whose truth was
guaranteed. (Tagg 78)
Photographic records would be, Diamond believed, free from caricature or
the “imprecisions of verbal language.” But, as John Tagg and others note,
the photographs were themselves “products of a complexly coded
intertextuality.... [which] drew not only on the conventions of contemporary
portraiture but also on the already developed codes of medical and
psychiatric illustration” (80). The photographic record which remains reveals
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the Victorian ambivalence towards the insane. These are not merely
patients; they are unfortunates arrested by the camera (if not yet by the law),
freaks, deviants, threats. They simultaneously invite sympathy, laughter, and
fear. And they emphatically declare their subjectivity.1 2
Anne Catherick’s escape, and later Laura’s own, underscore the fear
of the insane returning to threaten the community outside. A photographic
record (cheap, precise, mobile) seemed to offer protection.
In the case of criminal lunatics [declared T.N. Brushfield,
superintendent of the Chester County Lunatic Asylum], it
is frequently of great importance that a portrait should be
obtained, as many of them being originally of criminal
disposition and education, if they do escape from the
asylum are doubly dangerous to the community at large,
and they may frequently be traced by sending their
photographs to the police authorities (into whose hands
they are very likely to fall) from some act of depredation
they are likely to commit; the photographs would thus
cause them to be identified, and secure their safe return
to the asylum, (qtd. in Tagg 81)
1 2 The subjectivity of photographs alone was clearly recognized by the police, and efforts
were made to use photographs only as part of a system of identification. For example,
in1872 in France, Alphonse Bertillon proposed standardizing the photographing of criminals
in the pattern still used today — frontal, plus two profiles — and developed a shorthand
system of recording key physical characteristics for identification to be kept with the photos.
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Photographs become the agents of discipline; they “ would cause” the
criminal to be identified.
The scenario outlined suggests the first appearance of Anne
Catherick, “a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments”
(14), whom Hartright suddenly encounters on a moonlight walk home.
Having sent off the mysterious woman in a cab, Hartright overhears two men
(from the nearby asylum) in an open chaise asking a policeman, “Have you
seen a woman pass this way?” They can offer no other identification for her
beyond her being “in white” (Collins 21). Hartright of course “ takes” his own
impression of her, despite “ the dim light and ... perplexingly-strange
circumstances of our meeting” (15). It is an impression we recognize as
heavily mediated by time, experience, and the intervening knowledge of the
“ominous likeness” (50) between the woman in white and Laura.
Later, Laura’s identity could be easily established by what Talbot
called the “mute testimony” of a photograph. Ironically, photographs are
available to prove Mr. Fairlie’s ownership of objects, but not his niece’s
identity. A photograph would be the only “likeness” which could be “ tested in
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183
detail” — the one method which would suit Hartright’s requirements (his own
skill at painting would only provide an image “viewed generally”),1 3 But an
identification photograph of Laura Fairlie does not exist. In fact, the British
have always eschewed the use of photographs and other types of
identification papers for the general public. Passports with photographs were
issued in August 1914, at the outbreak of the first world war, but until then “ a
sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice
the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman....He
had no official number or identity card” (Taylor 1).
In his narrative, Hartright can only describe Laura via a watercolor
portrait he has done of her, from memory, “at an after period, in the place
and attitude in which I first saw her....I look at it, and there dawns upon me
brightly, from the dark greenish-brown background of the summer-house, a
light, youthful figure, clothed in a simple muslin dress” (39). Laura never
seems to achieve a concrete identity of her own; she is merely everyone’s
13 Daston and Galison, in discussing the effect of photography upon illustrations in medical
atlas, describe the shift from the generalized, idealized drawing of typical phenomena, to the
particular case which a camera would capture.
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184
fantasy object. Even the “dim mechanical drawing” he has made is less
powerful than his mental picture (40). He tells the reader, “ Take her as the
visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the
more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine” (41). She is not the
stuff of photography. As in Great Expectations, identity is contingent upon
“ fancy,” despite more ostensibly objective methods available. This seems
appropriate for Collins’s sensational tale: the woman’s white dress becomes
a tabula rasa upon which can be inscribed the fancies and desires of others,
whether they be for good (as are those of Hartright and Marion) or evil (as
those of Sir Percival). But the problem of establishing the fancy as the
determinant of identity is the contingency involved: the fact that others
control one’s identity. There is some element of attractiveness in this for
Collins’s hero: his ideal woman is lowered by her sufferings so that he can
marry her and thus make her — despite the initial differences in their social
and economic status — dependent upon him. However, there remains an
element of fear and uncertainty for the reader. How does one consolidate
one’s identity into a protected whole, and confirm it against the uncertainties
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of the world? One can get lost in London; one can be subject to others’ evil
doings — wherein lies safety?1 4 Anne Catherick, the threatening Other
lurking in the dark on the edge of the city, the spectral woman cut loose from
the domestic sphere, represents the reader’s own dark edges, which may
arise to compromise safety, social position, and self-knowledge.
Depending on the law to establish one’s identity, the novel makes
clear, is far from sufficient. One needs a hero like Walter Hartright, willing to
risk everything; one needs the luxury of time in order to untangle the web of
deceits which so easily take precedence (enemies are believed before
allies). Laura’s identity is finally established through an elaborate layering of
texts (including the various narratives constituting the novel, which, as D.A.
Miller points out, are never called to “ testify”) . 1 5 These range from Count
Fosco’s confession to the livery stables’ order books, from the false death
certificate to the false inscription on the grave — though carved in stone, it
1 4 I think of my own sense of security since my charge card company offered the option of
having my card imprinted with my photograph. It is now the sole credit card I carry, since I
trust that no one else can use it.
1 5 “Collins’s world is a veritable utopia of reading and writing, pursued both for the solution of
enigmas and their prolongation in suspense, in the pleasure of the text.... “ The novel
provides an “almost fetishistic text of narrative pleasure” (Brooks170).
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can be erased. The content of these texts, coupled with personal testimony
and a scripted summary of the plot against Laura (the only text the reader is
not privy to), are “performed” for the tenants of Limmeridge, like some
elaborate final act of a melodrama. Unlike Pip, Laura is helpless (in part, by
being over-protected, and in part, as an object of fancy rather than a fancying
subject — both determined by gender) to create her own identity and
depends on others to give it to her. The final method of identification is so
over-determined as to disallow any confidence in the reader of being able to
supply similar evidence to establish his or her own identity. Clearly, one’s
identity is not easily proclaimed: it is determined by what others choose to
believe, what can be asserted rather than what can be seen, words rather
than appearances (images).
“TheTwitchy Leer”______________
In contrast to The Woman in White, the material for discussing
photography in relationship to Great Expectations seems too thin: only one
brief mention on the first page, about photographs that were never even
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taken. But that parenthetical comment takes on great weight when
considering the issues of identity at the heart of the novel, and Dickens’s
assertive privileging of fancy over fact, words over images, and, by
extension, the written narrative over the photograph. One needs to consider
why Dickens even bothered to mention photographs at the start of the novel,
if only to dismiss them. Would a photograph of Pip’s parents have made a
difference in the story he tells? Perhaps not, but Dickens’s positing “ the
essence of the Photograph” (to use Barthes’s phrase) is crucial here. In the
opening paragraph, when an author can best teach a reader how to
understand the novel that lies ahead, Dickens places his work clearly outside
the range of the mechanical, evidential image, the exact reproduction of
reality; the rest of Pip’s narrative yearns for such concrete evidence. This
bind — wanting evidence but not trusting it — explains both Pip’s
misjudgments and Dickens’s attitude toward representation.
“ Take nothing on its looks,” Mr. Jaggers tells Pip, “ take everything on
evidence. There’s no better rule” (310). However, like Collins in offering a
plethora of textual documentation in The Woman in White, Dickens casts
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doubt on the value of any form of evidence in Great Expectations, from the
missing photograph and the flexible lettering of the opening scene to the
suggestion of manufactured testimony in Jaggers’s cases. Nothing seems to
hold still; no proof, however much desired or feared, is dependable. Pip
suffers not because he neglects to “take everything on evidence,” but
because the evidence available misleads him. For example, he falsely
assumes Miss Havisham’s involvement in his expectations only in part due to
his own desires; he also wrongly interprets her behavior (as she hopes he
will do), her association with Jaggers, her situation (she is rich, pleased by
him, etc.) and the lack of anything said to contradict what he believes. Pip
fails to question the gaps and silences in putting together his “case.”
Dickens, by extension, teaches the reader to do just that.
Mr. Jaggers, the master of silences, suggests that narrative is as
much about what not to say as about what is said, given that words
themselves are not concrete or absolute. He wants to hear little (“I want to
know no more than I know,” he tells a client [164]), and he cautions everyone
around him to speak without divulging anything. ‘“Don’t commit yourself,’ said
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189
Mr. Jaggers, ‘and don’t commit any one. You understand — any one. Don’t
tell me anything. I don’t want to know anything; I am not curious’” (309).
Language thus robbed of its expression, its commitment, produces a
narrative which fails to represent anything, least of all “ truth.” In Jaggers’s
world, the letter of the law easily bends, and verdicts depend on looks (like
Compeyson’s genteel appearance in court) rather than facts, or, by
extension, that what claim to be “ facts” are merely appearances. The law, as
symbolized by Jaggers, thus cannot be trusted; it inspires no confidence,
and offers no mercy. Rather, it blurs the facts, promising their confirmation
but letting fancy loose instead. Dickens’s comments on the legal system can
be easily applied to modes of representation (like the novel and photography)
which pretend to offer “ truth,” but instead provide a distorted mirroring of
reality.
Jaggers plays a pivotal role in Great Expectations; his legal dealings
connect the central story lines for Pip, as Miss Havisham’s affairs become
hopelessly entangled with Magwitch’s. Like Inspector Bucket of Bleak House,
Jaggers is a careful observer. When he first encounters the young Pip on
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190
the stairs at Miss Havisham’s, “He took my chin in his large hand and turned
up my face to have a look at me by the light of the candle....His eyes were
set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and suspicious” (93).
In his dealings as Pip’s guardian, he seems to be “lying in wait for me” (191),
and Wemmick admits, “ Always seems to me ... as if he had set a man-trap
and was watching it. Suddenly — click — you're caught!” (192).
Observation is associated with policing, and — click! — with a snapshot-like
arrest. This recalls Bucket’s first appearance, in the office of Mr.
Tulkinghorn, the lawyer: Bucket looks at Mr. Snagsby “as if he were going to
take his portrait” (275). The law threatens to rob individuals of their freedom
and identity — in Dickens’s choice of words, he implicates photography as an
agent of the law.
In his office, Jaggers possesses the only likenesses “ taken” in Great
Expectations, “ the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them,” death
masks of criminals (193). As likenesses, according to Wemmick, they show
“ the genuine look” (194) — the dead are far easier to identify than the living.
Jaggers himself is, like Bucket, clearly associated with death — his chair
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“ was of deadly black horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin”
(162). The detective and the lawyer, calculating and emotionally distanced,
prefigure the character of Sherlock Holmes, as described by Watson in
Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891):
He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and
observing machine that the world has seen: but as a
lover, he would have placed himself in a false position.
He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe
and a sneer....[F]or the trained reasoner to admit such
intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted
temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which
might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a
sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-
power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a
strong emotion in a nature such as his. (32)
Doyle reduces the observer, “ trained” and “adjusted,” to a machine. It is
easy to interpret that machine as a camera, given that in “A Scandal in
Bohemia” the antagonist threatens to use a photograph of a dangerous
indiscretion as a “weapon” (51) in a potential blackmail.
To become an “observing machine,” especially a “perfect” one, means
a kind of doom, a disassociation from feeling. The law, in all its supposed
objectivity, threatens the messy throb of life, replacing it with a cold-hearted
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pretense of neutrality. For Jaggers, Wemmick tells Pip, “It’s not personal;
it’s professional: only professional” (192). The one human, compassionate
act in which Jaggers is caught is having tried to rescue “one pretty little child
out of the heap” by separating Estella from her criminal parents and giving
her to Miss Havisham, which Pip judges to have been an inhumane
alternative.
Jaggers, Bucket and Holmes pretend to a certain neutrality, upon
which Dickens and Doyle both cast doubt. Doyle tosses “grit” on Holmes’s
“lenses” frequently; rather than implacable, the great detective becomes the
victim of his own repressed desires. Dickens shows what the agents of the
law lack by placing them in striking contrast with characters overwhelmed by
feeling: Bucket with Esther Summerson, Jaggers with Pip. Unable to assert
absolute truth, the law, Dickens implies, needs to learn compassion.
But ultimately, as a detective trying to solve the mystery of his own
identity, Pip is too self-absorbed to gain the necessary distance from his
“ case” in order to understand what he learns. Pip’s highly subjective
observation refuses to be limited by facts. He begins in front of his parents’
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193
graves, without any evidence beyond the text of their tombstones. He yearns
for surrogate parents and systematically employs, then rejects, several: Joe,
Miss Havisham, Magwitch. He longs to be the hero in the fairy tale, rescuing
the damsel in distress, marrying the princess; he cannot see that she won’t
ever have him. He misses some clues and misjudges others. He avoids
conclusions (as the ambiguous endingjs] make clear), preferring
expectations and uncharted possibilities. And while the reader, in retrospect,
can trace where Pip went wrong, we share his disappointments and applaud
his stumbling achievements.
Great Expectations celebrates the surfacing of feeling against all
odds: Magwitch’s sympathy for the young Pip, Wemmick’s hidden castle,
Pip’s own softness despite his being “brought up by hand,” even Jaggers’s
attempt to protect Estella. To do so, Dickens sees fit to reject what appeared
at the time to be the great symbol of unfeeling, mechanical, evidential art, the
photograph. He doesn’t yet comprehend (as Barthes will) that reading
photographs is all about feeling — seeking out the punctum at the expense
of the studium— as much as reading words is. If the facts before one can
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be read differently by different people, according to their individual needs, so
can photographs. Photographs leave as much to the imagination as the
letters on the tombstones did.
When Pip bends those letters to make his parents appear in his mind
in ways that suit his lonely desires, Dickens not only asserts the power of his
own imagination, but the relatively new epistemology which comprehends
that all reality, however concrete it may appear, is malleable, not only by
fancy but by the forces of culture which choose to mold it to its liking, with
often paradoxical results. When a blacksmith’s apprentice can become a
gentleman, being a gentleman loses its meaning because it is exposed as a
set of superficial accomplishments. Imagination allows Pip to reconceive his
future, but his invention causes him to miss clues which could help him
straighten out his life.
Dickens’s dismissal of photography at the start of Great Expectations
points to an anxiety about representation which permeates his novels. He
retreats from an era which attempted to show the “real world” can be pinned
down, fixed — and the photograph is only one of several developing
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technologies which promise to accomplish this — in part by setting his story
a generation before, when everything, nostalgia wants us to believe, was
more secure. The forge is a wonderful symbol of this: rather than a dark,
mist-shrouded place of loneliness and abuse, it emerges as a pastoral
retreat, making possible Pip’s attempted return to innocence. But this is only
an attempt. While one can go home again, it is never the same home one
left.
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Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. "A Short History of Photography." Trachtenberg 199-216.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New
York: Vintage, 1984.
Cadava, Eduardo. "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History."
Diacritics (Fall-Winter 1992). 84-114.
Carroll, Lewis. “Photography Extraordinary.” Helmut Gernsheim. Lewis
Carroll: Photographer. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969.
110-113.
Clarke, Graham. The Photograph. New York: Oxford University Press,
1997.
Clarke, Graham, ed. The Portrait in Photography. London: Reaktion Books,
1992.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. New York: E.P. Dutton &
Co., 1975.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
The Woman in White. New York: Bantam, 1985.
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
London: J. Murray, 1872.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. “ The Image of Objectivity.”
Representations 40 (Fall 1992), 81-128.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: St. Martins Press, 1996.
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Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Sherlock Holmes, ed. John
A. Hodgson. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 32-52.
Fried, Michael. Courbet's Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990.
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
Haworth-Booth, Mark. The Golden Age of British Photography 1839-1900.
London: Aperture, 1984.
The Origins of British Photography. London: Thames and Hudson,
1991.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and
Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Kincaid, James R. Annoying the Victorians. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988.
Mitchell, W.J.T. “ The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies.” Picture
Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 281-322.
Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 1982.
Phillips, Sandra S., Mark Haworth-Booth, and Carol Squiers, eds. Police
Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence. San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1997.
Roberts, Pam. “ Julia Margaret Cameron: A Triumph over Criticism.” Clarke,
Portrait, 47-70.
Robinson, Henry Peach. “Idealism, Realism, Expressionism.” Trachtenberg
91-97.
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Rugg, Linda Haverly. Picturing Ourselves: Photography & Autobiography.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Sekula, Allan. “ The Body and the Archive.” The Contest of Meaning: Critical
Histories of Photography. Ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992. 343-388.
Stewart, Garrett. "Reading Figures: The Legible Image of Victorian
Textuality." Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination.
Eds. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995. 345-367.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Talbot, H. Fox. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans, 1844.
Taylor, A.J.P. English History 1914-45. New York: Oxford University Press,
1965.
Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven:
Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
Wilkinson, Lynn R. "Le cousin Pons and the Invention of Ideology." PMLA
107:2 (March 1992): 274-289.
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Street Life: From Boz to Photo Documentary
Cities are too mobile, too active; their citizens pose
problems because they will not pose. (Stein 277)
At the height of Victoria’s reign, it would have been difficult to describe
London, and particularly its poor, without somehow acknowledging the
importance and effect of Dickens’s view of it, especially if one wished to
borrow prestige from his growing popularity and social influence. Dickens’s
way of seeing and describing the city obscured the distinction between fiction
and journalism. Jacob’s Island, the squalid setting for Bill Sykes’s demise in
Oliver Twist, provides a case in point. In his 1850 preface to the cheap
edition of Oliver Twist, Dickens writes about attending a meeting of the
Metropolitan Sanitary Association, at which the Bishop of London discussed
the cost of sanitary improvements for Jacob’s Island. The Bishop mentioned
Dickens’s portrayal of the area: its “dirt-smeared walls and decaying
foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome
indication of filth, rot and garbage ... a desolate island indeed” (321).
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Several days later, Dickens reports, Sir Peter Laurie, an alderman of
Marylebone parish, denounced the request for funds to improve water and
drainage, declaring, to “roars of laughter,” that Jacob’s Island “ONLY existed
in a work of fiction, written by Mr. Charles Dickens ten years ago ” (352). In
his preface, Dickens then argues that a fictional description cannot erase the
reality of a place. But the “reality” of Jacob’s Island, “[LJong ... infamous as
one of the vilest slums of London” (Himmelfarb 709), had already been
compromised by reports. In September of 1849, Henry Mayhew had written
an article about it in the Morning Chronicle, the piece which initiated the
project that became London Labour and the London Poor. At the time,
cholera severely ravaged the area; the disease had also broken out there in
1832. Gertrude Himmelfarb sees the connection between Mayhew’s reports
and Dickens’s fiction, wondering “ whether Dickens had been inspired by
earlier newspaper accounts of the epidemic, or whether Mayhew, in writing
his account, was inspired by Dickens” (709).
Dickens’s view of London shaped even the developing use of “ the
Pencil of Nature,” photography. This can be clearly seen in photographer
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John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith’s 1877 Street Life in London,
the first social documentary illustrated by photographs. Street Life begins
with an apology for “reopening a subject which has already been amply and
ably treated” (Preface). The authors specifically name London Labour and
the London Poor as inspiration, but, particularly given Himmelfarb’s
declaration that Dickens’s “most memorable characters and scenes were
Mayhewian (or perhaps Mayhew’s were Dickensian)” (727), traces of the
novelist can be found throughout. They can also be discovered in Jacob
Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which utilizes the same blend of fact and
feeling, narrative and photography, to report on New York tenements in
1890. In the nineteenth century — and beyond — Dickens influenced not
only how poverty was described in prose, but also how it could be seen in
photographs.
Both Street Life in London and How the Other Half Lives claim to be
accurate “studies,” documents attesting to the condition of the poor. Despite
their reliance on photographs as evidence, both easily exceed the dictionary
or common-sense definition of “documentary” as an objective presentation of
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2 02
facts; they emphasize the sensational side of their reports, so as to stimulate
sympathy and charity. As Riis notes, “ The story is dark enough, drawn from
the plain public records, to send a chill to any heart” (60). This confirms what
William Stott identifies as the two-fold meaning of documentary: the
combination of official, factual, historical documents with another kind of
material, a “human document.” “Even when temperate, a human document
carries and communicates feeling, the raw material of drama” (7). Along the
same lines, in Doing Documentary Work, Robert Coles bewails his students’
insistence upon the separation of fact and feeling in their reports.
They commonly pose for themselves the familiar
alternative of fiction, as though we were dealing in clear-
cut opposites: if not the true as against the false, at
least the real as against the imaginary. But such
opposites or alternatives don’t quite do justice either
conceptually or pragmatically to the aspect of “human
actuality” that has to do with the vocational life of writers,
photographers, folklorists, musicologists, and
filmmakers, those who are trying to engage with people’s
words, their music, gestures, movements, and overall
appearance and then let others know what they have
learned. (88-89)
The problem in distinguishing between fact and fiction, as Coles sees it, is
the way in which “ fictional devices ... inform the construction of nonfiction,
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203
and of course, fiction, conversely, draws upon the actual, the ‘real-life’” (90).
What immerges from the imagination can be
a kind of truth, sometimes [and here he refers to
Dickens, among others] ...a n enveloping and
unforgettable wisdom that strikes the reader as realer
than real, a truth that penetrates deep within one, that
leaps beyond verisimilitude or incisive portrayal,
appealing and recognizable characterization, and lands
on a terrain where the cognitive, the emotional, the
reflective, and the moral live side-by-side. (93)
This is the “kind of truth” sought by Dickens in his fiction, which in turn
inspired the way in which Street Life in London and How the Other Half Lives
construct their narratives.
Smith and Thomson claim that because of “ the precision of
photography in illustration of our subject,” unlike any predecessors in the
field, ‘The unquestionable accuracy of this testimony will enable us to
present true types of the London Poor and shield us from the accusation of
either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance”
(Preface). It must be noted that London Labour and the London Poor also
employed photographs, in the form of woodcuts based on daguerreotypes
done by Richard Beard in his studio. Thomson can claim a greater accuracy,
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given that he took his camera out on the streets and the photographs
themselves are reproduced in the book, but like Beard, he employed poses,
props and compositions that replicate existing visual conventions.
[T]he positioning of the mid-Victorian London poor as a
subject of the new “documentary” photograph and the
new social-scientific exploration was, to a large extent,
nothing new at all. The iconography of the images
presented preserved the existing visual traditions
associated with the “Cries of London” genre, maintaining
that genre’s focus on marginal street trades and those
images’ isolation of their subjects from street interaction.
What was new was the authority the photographic
images gained through the claims of truth that came with
the “ transcriptive” art of photography and the racial
“ science” of anthropology. These new truth claims
served to justify something else quite old: the conviction
that poverty was natural, as “natural” and unremediable
as race itself. (Prasch 190-191)
Photography, of course, appears to offer a way to remove such
cultural screens by recording what is “really” there to be seen. But Victorians
quickly learned that rather than guaranteeing accuracy, photography could
easily be employed to deceive its audience. Early writers on the form
sometimes encouraged artists to use soft focus to clarify for the viewer the
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distinction between art and reality,1 and the reception of composition prints
like those done by Oscar Rejlander and H P . Robinson taught the public not
to believe everything they saw. In these art photos, the silent image could be
made to say anything. But even stripped of self-consciously artistic
manipulations, photography presents what Roland Barthes calls “ the
photographic paradox.” While the denotative status of the photograph, its
11 n the first issue of The Journal of the Photographic Society, in March 1853, Sir William J.
Newton’s report, “Upon Photography in an Artistic View," admits that photography is
“seductive," but it cannot teach the "principles of art."
Who has not studied nature so much as to observe how beautifully she throws her
atmospheric veil, detaching each object, while producing that harmony and union of
parts which the most splendid specimen of chemical Photography fails to realize!
Consequently, at present, it is in vain to look for that representation of light and shade in
Photography, which is to be found in a fine work of art. (6)
Cameras can, as a compromise, Newton argues, be manipulated for artistic purposes. "I
have found in many instances that the object is better obtained by the whole subject being a
little out of focus, thereby giving a greater breadth of effect, and consequently more
suggestive of the true character of nature." "The true character of nature," then, appears not
in response to direct, unmediated sight; rather it requires a vision “out of focus," which
would allow for recognition of “effect" and nature's "suggestive" powers. "The object" to be
obtained, therefore, is not the direct representation of nature; rather, photography fails, in
Newton's argument, by not instigating the interpretive process.
"[Tjhis excellent artist could hardly have chosen an audience less fitted to endure such a
proposition," Lady Eastlake later commented. “As soon could an accountant admit the
morality of a false balance, or a seamstress the neatness of a puckered seam, as your
merely scientific photographer be made to comprehend the possible beauty of 'a slight burr
(60).
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“ analogical plenitude ... is so great that the description of a photograph is
literally impossible” (18), connotations also arise, from the way in which the
photographic image has been produced — “worked on, chosen, composed,
constructed” — and read — “ connected more or less consciously by the
public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs” (19). These
connotations invite articulation.
The viewer, in essence, must speak for the photograph. “Like the
masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual
representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse,”
W.J.T. Mitchell writes (157), calling particular attention to photography’s
disciplinary functions. Twice removed from the real thing — a representation
which must be represented — photography borrows vocabulary from both
visual and verbal sources. What is striking in Victorian photographic
documentary of the urban poor is how often that vocabulary comes from
Dickens.
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Street Life in London makes both explicit and implicit references to
Dickens. Much like Sketches by Boz, Street Life proposes to present “ true
types of the London Poor,” harking back to a notion of representation
championed by Samuel Johnson over a century before in Rasselas:
The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not
the individual, but the species; to remark general
properties and large appearances: he does not number
the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades
in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his
portraits of nature such prominent and striking features,
as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect
the minuter discriminations, which one may have
remarked, and another have neglected, for those
characteristicks which are alike obvious to vigilance and
carelessness. (61)
Johnson’s argument is at odds with the kind of truth produced by
photography, which depends upon direct observation of individuals, upon
numbering “ the streaks of the tulip” and marking “minuter discriminations.”
But, in part hoping to borrow prestige from painting and its “portraits of
nature,” Victorian photography frequently worked against its specifying power
to focus upon generalized “ types,” for various purposes. Lewis Carroll, for
example, dressed his middle class subjects as beggars and waifs, reducing
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2 08
poverty to a sanitary costume and giving it an aura of charm; background
and pose signify an effort to associate photography with painterly effects. Yet
Alice Liddell remains Alice Liddell in his
photograph; the individual still appears
clearly through the guise of the beggar
girl (fig. 1).
The real poor were extensively
photographed as well, with less
picturesque aims. Dr. Barnardo’s
Homes for destitute children kept
extensive photographic records, amassing 55,000 photographs of children as
they entered and left the institution between 1874 and 1905 (Tagg 83).
These testify to photography’s disciplinary powers, as well as revealing the
Victorian fascination with and fear of poverty. More than eighty such pictures
were published, in pamphlets telling stories of rescue and rehabilitation, or in
“ complementary cards of the ‘once a little vagrant — now a little workman’
type, which ... sold in packs of twenty for five shillings or singly for sixpence”
Figure 1 Lewis Carroll: Alice
Liddell as Beggar Girl
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209
(Tagg 85). Ironically, in 1877, Barnardo faced legal allegations that “He is
not satisfied with taking [the children’s photographs] as they really are, but he
tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are.
They are also taken in purely fictitious positions" (qtd. in Tagg 85; see also
the chapter “In Court” in Wagner). The real poor were clearly not sufficiently
picturesque; they needed to be reduced to conform to type.
In order to erase the individual (and its threat to a generalized “ truth” ),
photographers had to turn to more aggressive techniques, manipulating and
controlling their supposed mechanical (objective) images. In the 1870s, for
example, Francis Galton produced composite photographs to represent
types: “ such as the tubercular, the prize-winning racehorse, the Jew and the
criminal” (Phillips 55). The resulting ethereal images attempt to erase
humanizing characteristics to produce a pseudo-scientific specimen —
Everyman, but no man.
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To transform into types the individuals that its photographs record, the
text of Street Life works to undermine the direct impact of its images.
Thomson sometimes avoids the problem by showing more than one figure in
a given picture — “ Workers on the ‘Silent Highway’” or “Recruiting Sargeants
at Westminster” — or by specifically naming representative characters,
“Caney” the Clown or Billy Jack,
like roles in a morality play. But
the challenge arises
nevertheless, as when Thomson
provides a photograph for the
section entitled “ The London
Boardmen," about which the text
declares “ there is no more
heterogeneous set in existence”
(93). The photograph (fig. 2) shows only one London boardman, which
necessitates employing several strategies, both visual and textual, to counter
the photograph’s individualizing effects. The boardman’s face is caught in
Figure 2 John Thomson: London
Boardmen
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211
shadow, as if a thumb tried to wipe out its distinguishing characteristics.
Instead, it’s the clear portrait on the advertising board which stands out,
drawing our attention away from the photo’s ostensible subject. The
boardman is deemed as inconsequential as the lamp post by which he
stands, which also enjoys a clearer focus, and he serves as proof of the
accompanying text’s judgement that
Few men who earn their living in the streets are better
abused and more persistently jeered at than the
unfortunate individuals who let themselves out for hire as
walking advertisements. The work is so hopelessly
simple, that any one who can put one foot before the
other can undertake it, and the carrying of boards has
therefore become a means of subsistence open to the
most stupid and forlorn of individuals. (91)
The text teaches us how to read the image, while the image lends credence
to the text. “ Truth,” if it exists at all, lies not in the accuracy of the means by
which the image is reproduced, but the reader’s acceptance of the text’s
assertion that the photograph illustrates the typical.
Using Dickens as a guide for generating such a text is easy to
understand, given his well known ability to create characters which seem at
once real and representative — and completely fantastical. His immense
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212
popularity among those whom Thomson and Smith hoped to reach with their
work would make any allusion profitable. Most importantly, with his
descriptive skills and his narrative stance as flaneur, Dickens provides a
model for visualizing London in Sketches by Boz. Dickens borrows the
designation “ sketch” from drawing, a term which Peter Galassi defines as
suggesting, in the nineteenth century, “ the syntax of art devoted to the
singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable.” Galassi adds,
“It is also the syntax of photography” (25). Certainly, the connection between
sketches and photography can be easily traced, whether in William Henry
Fox Talbot’s apocryphal tale of being inspired to invent photography because
of his poor drawing skills, or in the practice of Ruskin, the pre-Rafaelites, and
others who used photographs in lieu of sketches. But Galassi’s assumption
of the meaning of the “syntax” of the sketch ignores the efforts evident
throughout Victorian art — and particularly Victorian photography — to
transform “ the singular and contingent” into “ the universal and stable.” Take,
for instance, Thomson’s photograph, “ The Crawlers” (fig. 3), with its clear
reference to classic Madonna paintings. In his Sketches, Dickens self-
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213
consciously rejects any hint of a photographic or mechanical record of reality
in favor of the transforming power
of the imagination, in which the
momentary can become the
mythical.
Sketches by Boz is full of
factual details; however, for
Dickens, accuracy is not as
dependent on what he sees, as on
what he makes of his observations.
Years later, after photography had become well established, he continues to
assert the superiority of his powers. He describes himself while on a reading
tour as having “made a little fanciful photograph in my mind of Pit Country,
which will come well into H.W. [Household Words] one day.”
I couldn’t help looking upon my mind as I was doing it,
as a sort of capitally prepared and highly sensitive plate.
And I said, without the least conceit (as Watkins [an
important London portrait photographer] might have said
of a plate of his) “it really is a pleasure to work with you,
you receive the impression so nicely.” (qtd. in Lettis 207)
Figure 3 John Thomson: The "Crawlers
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214
While Dickens sees himself as a “ sensitive” observer, the emphasis here is
on the author’s sympathy and not upon the accuracy of the record of his
observation. From Sketches by Boz on, Dickens firmly argues that vision is
not dependent on an objective reality; it is the product of an observer’s
subjectivity.
In the Sketches, Dickens positions Boz, like a roving photographer,
as an outside observer, wandering the streets and wondering about what he
finds there. What he finds is far less important in the end than what he
makes of what he finds, his imaginary adventures. This is most telling in the
piece, “Meditations in Monmouth Street,“ “ the only true and real emporium for
second-hand wearing apparel” (74). There is nothing “ true and real” about
what Dickens does with his observations here. “ We love to walk among
these extensive groves of the illustrious dead,” he tells us, “ and to indulge in
the speculations to which they give rise” (75). He can see a man’s “ whole life
written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed
on parchment before us”; or, rather, he can teach his readers how to read
onto the unknown poor the stories with which they can become
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215
most comfortable. Observation only serves to reinforce speculation, of which
Boz repeatedly reminds the reader: “ the more we looked, the more we were
convinced of the accuracy of our previous impression” (75); “we felt as much
sorrow when we saw, or fancied we saw — it makes no difference which —
the change that began to take place now” (76); “ We could imagine that coat
— imagine! We could see it; we had seen it a hundred times” (77). Vision
here is used in service to the imagination.
Dickens celebrates the subjective body of the observer, often in
motion, but sometimes, as in “Hackney-Coach Stands,” on a seat, peering
through a window, or slightly off to the side. Like several pieces in Sketches
by Boz, "Hackney-Coach Stands" calls attention to the construction of its
narrative "we." Here, the narrator himself has become a text, embodying his
account of London's street life: "We are a walking book of fares, feeling
ourselves half bound, as it were to be always in the right on contested points"
(82). The narrator attempts to maintain control not only of the text but of the
scene he depicts by situating himself in a particular place ("There is a
hackney-coach stand under the very window at which we are writing"), at a
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216
particular moment ("there is only one coach on it now"). He insinuates
himself into the scene, imagining that a servant girl casts "two or three
gracious glances across the way, which are either intended for us or the pot
boy (we are not quite certain which) .... The narrator attempts through
speculation to be omniscient as well, giving voice to the horse ("as if he were
saying, in a whisper, that he should like to assassinate the coachman") and
describing the scene inside the house across the street: "The youngsters
disappear, and a short pause ensues, during which the old lady is, no doubt,
kissing them all round in the back parlor" (83). Like the decorative puns that
fill the sketch, the shifting narrative position suggests both a playfulness and
an uncertainty about managing his task. On the eve of the invention of
photography, the Sketches serve notice of Dickens’s belief in the superior
claims of mostly sympathetic subjectivity over mechanical objectivity.
Sketches by Boz predicts what Nancy Armstrong calls the
“reconceptua!iz[ation of] literary realism in relation to photography” (38).
Armstrong argues that by the mid 1850s, “ fiction equated seeing with
knowing and made visual information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal
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217
narrative.... [I]n order to be realistic,
literary realism referenced a world of
objects that either had been or could
be photographed” (39). In turn, Street
Life in London shows how fiction
shaped photography; its images and
many of its descriptions referenced a
world previously known primarily
through Dickens. In combining fact with fancy, direct observation with
judgement, Smith and Thomson follow
Dickens’s lead. Several of the images in
Street Life seem photographed versions of
Cruikshank’s drawings for Sketches by Boz.
Compare, for example, the photograph of
“Old Clothes of St. Giles” with Cruikshank’s
"Monmouth Street,” or “London Cabmen” (fig.
4) with the drawing of “ The Last Cab-Driver”
Figure 5 George Cruikshank:
The Last Cab-Driver
Figure 4 John Thomson: London
Cabmen
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218
(fig. 5). The most clear indication of the relationship between this
photographic documentary and Dickens’s works comes in Adolphe Smith’s
description of “’Hookey Alf,’ of Whitechapel.” Smith writes,
It will always be found that those who have the best
claim to help and succour are the last to seek out for
themselves the assistance they should receive. It is only
by accident that such cases are discovered, and hence
my belief that time spent among the poor themselves is
far more productive of good and permanent results, than
liberal subscriptions given to institutions of which the
donor knows no more than can be gleaned from the
hurried perusal of an abbreviated prospectus. In this
manner Dickens acquired his marvelous stores of
material and knowledge of the people. Exaggerated as
some of his characters may seem, their prototypes are
constantly coming on the scene, and as I talked to
“Hookey” it seemed as if the shade of Captain Cuttle had
penetrated the wilds of Whitechapel. (Thomson 108)
The reference to Dickens functions on many levels. Smith asserts the
accuracy of his testimony by contrasting it to Dickens’s exaggerations
(similar to how Dickens himself will mention, then dismiss photography in
order to place his fictions in the context of photographic realism). Ironically,
despite his recognition of those exaggerations, Smith positions Dickens as
an guide to knowing the poor. His aim is a moral one: showing the need to
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understand better “ those who have
the best claim to help and succour”
in order to offer assistance which
will yield more “permanent results”
than philanthropy from a safe
distance. But at the same time, by
alluding to Dickens’s fictional lens,
Smith makes the poor seem more
easily comprehensible —
condensed into types, from which it is a short step to caricature,
dehumanization.2 Even the Dickensian sounding nickname with which
Smith identifies the person he’s describing, “Hookey Alf," signals this
reduction is well underway.
Despite the authors’ efforts to direct the readers’ interpretation of the
characters met in Street Life, the real strength of its photographs depends on
2 Stein, writing about Great Expectations, identifies in “Pip’s recently urbanized gaze — the
instinctive resort to stereotypes, the compulsive creation of distance” (“Street” 235).
Figure 4 John Thomson: “ Hookey
Alf, “ of Whitechapel
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220
the impression that their subjects always seem to threaten to wrest control
from the photographer (and narrator), as evidenced by the blurred
movement, the direct gaze, even the mysterious shadows cast by figures
outside of the frame.3 As much as Thomson seems to pose and freeze his
subjects, the buzz and jitter of the city intrudes. These “ types” refuse to be
captured, and threaten to tell their own story. The photograph of “Hookey Alf’
(fig. 6) shows nine figures outside of what we can assume from the beer
mugs is a public house. Our interest is first caught by the direct stare of the
woman holding the infant, situated near the center of the picture. She is in
full focus; others are more hazy. The majority of the subjects look directly at
the camera; an additional figure, presumably a child, is shown only as a
haze in the lower right hand comer, as if she has just momentarily appeared
before the completion of the exposure. The verbal narrative must reclaim
control. Here is Smith’s description:
3 “Against the common practice of the period, Thomson often took the background out of
focus instead of presenting clear focus throughout the depth of field, a focusing strategy that
looked forward to P.H. Emerson’s photographic ‘naturalism’” (Prasch 188).
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221
There is a metropolitan mixture of good and evil in the
countenances that may here be studied, which will
supply food for thought, if the thought be not always
cheerful. Thus in the photograph before us we have the
calm undisturbed face of the skilled artisan, who has
spent a life of tranquil, useful labour, and can enjoy his
pipe in peace, while under him sits a woman whose
painful expression seems to indicate a troubled
existence, and a past which even drink cannot obliterate.
By her side, a brawny, healthy “ woman of the people,” is
not to be disturbed from her enjoyment of a “drop of
beer” by domestic cares; and early acclimatizes her
infant to the fumes of tobacco and alcohol. But in the
fore-ground the camera has chronicled the most
touching episode. A little girl, not too young, however, to
ignore the fatal consequences of drink, has penetrated
boldly into the group, as if about to reclaim some relation
in danger and drag him away from evil companionship.
There is not a sight to be seen in the streets of London
more pathetic than this oft-repeated story — the little
child leading home a drunken parent. (105)
The text blatantly imposes labels, histories and motivations, transforming
these unknown folk into recognizable types — the “skilled artisan,” the
“ woman of the people,” the “little child” — with “oft-repeated” stories. No
longer individuals — the one quality about them which the photograph itself
can confirm — they are mere ciphers from which the writer can construct his
argument. By calling attention to the photograph, to what “ the camera has
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222
chronicled,” he attempts to mask his methods. Only close examination of the
photograph locates “Hookey” himself, who we assume is the man sitting on
the edge of the table because of the hook at the end of his left arm; he does
not occupy the center of the image, and his posture and blurred aspect fail to
call our attention. The narrative must direct us to what it claims is “ the most
remarkable figure in this group.”
In Street Life in London, the Dickensian heritage remains intact. Its
sympathetic reporting borrows narrative strategies from fiction, asserting the
veracity of the mobile, subjective observer, reinforced by the pretense of fact
in the photographic record. By appropriating photography as a means of
asserting the “ truth,” it combines documentary realism with melodrama.
While advocating positive change for the poor, Street Life manages to
sentimentalize and sanitize them, according to a model well established by
Dickens.
Like Street Life in London, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives
“straddles the categories of fiction and documentary, artifice and mimesis”
(Orvell 96). Near the start of his career as a journalist, Riis worked as a
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223
peddler, selling illustrated editions of Dickens’s novels, and he obviously
sampled his wares. Having spent ten years trying to interest his New York
readers in the plight of the tenement dwellers, in 1887 Riis immediately
recognized the importance of the discovery of flash photography as a means
of illuminating and recording even the darkest comers of the city. He
organized a “raiding party,” consisting of a photographer, a doctor, the chief
of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and a police officer or two, to visit the
tenements and record their observations:
It was not too much to say that our party carried terror
wherever it went. The flashlight of those days was
contained in cartridges fired from a revolver. The
spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house
in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they
shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring, however
sugary our speech, and it was not to be wondered at if
the tenants bolted through the windows and down fire-
escapes wherever we went. But as no one was
murdered, I had made out by the flashlight possibilities
my companions little dreamed of (Riis, Making 268-9).
Eventually, deserted by his co-conspirators, Riis taught himself
photography, and took a small detective camera to gather images. On
January 25,1889, working with a magic lantern, Riis presented to the
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224
members of the New York Society of Amateur Photographers his first “lay
sermon,” an illustrated talk entitled, “ The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies
in New York.” Like Dickens before him, Riis was an accomplished
entertainer, leading his audience through a tour of between 60 and 100
images, accompanied by sensationalized prose and melodramatic gestures.
We get a hint of these performances in the text:
In his prose, Riis sighs and moans, addresses the
reader directly, and makes liberal use of the second
person — all devices characteristic of sentimental
melodrama. These romantic touches, designed to tug
on the chords of his readers’ emotions, are
counterbalanced by vivid photographic description, dry
statistical data, and objective reportage, all of which Riis
uses to alert and alarm his readers. (Leviatin 33)
In his narrative, both in his lectures and the book which later arose from
them,
Riis gives us, with the often willing and knowing
collaboration of his subjects, a metonymic typology of
urban slums, presenting for us “ the poor,” “ the
miserable,” “ the other half.” He is after the general truth
of a general category, and the finer truths of individuals
necessarily escape him. (Orvell 97)
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225
This emphasis on type and “general truth” repeats the strategies of Dickens
and Street Life in London. The dramatizing or fictionalizing of Riis’s subject
did not bother most of his reviewers; instead they celebrated the mixture of
preaching and performance. “Books like this that lift the curtains, and expose
to public gaze the great evils of the system will hasten the day of reform"
(Christian Intelligencer, 24 December 1890, qtd. in Leviatin 8). One Riis
supporter did see the need to differentiate between Riis’s work and fiction:
How the Other Half Lives was
enormously more interesting than any novel that ever
was written or that ever will be written. Dens, dives,
hovels, sickness, death, sorrow, drink, and murder, all
these exist in our midst in appalling magnitude. No book
that has ever appeared in this land pours such light as
Mr. Riis’s book on “ The Other Half.” (Dr. A.T. Schauffler,
qtd. Leviatin 8)
The catalogue, the hyperbole, and the emphatic “no book that has ever
appeared in this land” seem to point directly at Dickens as progenitor of this
brand of melodramatic documentary. An explicit reference to Dickens
appears in Riis’s story of David Smith, the “New York Fagin” (Riis 115); even
if the tag did not originate with Riis, it provides evidence of the interweaving
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2 2 6
of fact and fiction (particularly Dickens’s) in how the middle class at large
understood the poor.4
The connection between Riis and Dickens can be further established
in their mutual interest in an area of lower Manhattan called the Five Points.
Dickens had visited the notorious slum in 1842, and described it in his
American Notes:
This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the
right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth.
Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as
elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors,
have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over.
4 Miles Orvell argues that the interplay of photography and fiction was becoming more
pronounced in America when Riis’s book appeared.
[Pjhotography in the 1890s was already beginning to have a significant
effect on the way many younger writers thought about literary
representation. For the distinction between truth and accuracy that was at
the core of the realist’s self-definition was inevitably sharpened by
comparisons with photography, which in the 1890s was becoming more
and more a part of the common consciousness, as the periodical press
increasingly reproduced photographs to satisfy the popular taste ... [T]he
camera still maintained, with the general public and with most writers, its
reputation as a completely truthful medium of representation. But precisely
its widespread acceptance as a metaphor for truth would give it an
ambiguous status as a model for literature. (123-4)
Works by writers like Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were regularly assessed for their
photographic qualities (see Orvell’s chapter, ‘The Romance of the Real”). “Photographic”
came to be used to mean both the appearance of neutrality, objectivity and authenticity, as
well what could be called its flash: “its power to startle the reader by its vividness” (Orvell
126). Both meanings relate directly to Riis’ work.
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227
Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old.
See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how
the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly,
like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. (88-89)
At times, Dickens’s account sounds like a report of a Riis “raiding party”; at
the very least, it shares the “ you are there” techniques of the illustrated magic
lantern lectures:
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing
on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me
into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath
of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his
sleep by the officer’s voice — he knows it well — but
comforted by his assurance that he has not come on
business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle.
The match flickers for a moment, and shows great
mounds of dusty rags upon the ground; then dies away
and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can
be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down the
stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper
with his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be
astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with
heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their
white teeth chattering and their bright eyes glistening
and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the
countless repetition of one astonished African face in
some strange mirror. (89-90)
The quick impression afforded by the flickering match, the second (lingering)
look, the reference to the “strange mirror” — all suggest photographs,
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2 2 8
captured, as Riis’s were, by a voyeur violating the privacy of the poor and
accompanied by the police-cum-tour guide.
Riis’s unposed photographs, enabled by the invasive flash, are far
more gritty than Thomson’s, or, for that matter, than Dickens’s descriptions.
They affirm what the American’s predecessors avoid admitting: the
aggression inherent in the act of looking, of staring, particularly at those less
fortunate. Mitchell writes,
The “ taking” of human subjects by a photographer (or a
writer) is a concrete social encounter, often between a
damaged, victimized, and powerless individual and a
relatively privileged observer, often acting as the “eye of
power,” the agent of some social, political, or journalistic
institution. (288)
Clive Scott extends this point:
To take a photograph at all is to proclaim a superiority, if
only an economic and technological one, and the
documentary photograph makes the in-built assumption
that its subject does not take (has not the wherewithal to
take) photographs of his/her own. Documentary
photographs cannot, by definition, achieve neutrality;
they are already produced according to the constraints
of a certain visual language, according to certain
spectatorial expectations. (78)
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229
Riis’s aggressiveness borders on the dangerous (literally as well as
figuratively: his flash experiments once set a tenement wall on fire and
another time nearly blinded Riis himself), so much so that the text makes an
effort to soften the impact
of the photographs. Some
are stylized, posed shots,
such as the Madonna-like
“In the Home of an Italian
Rag-Picker, Jersey Street”
(fig. 7);5 half-tones are
intermingled with engraved illustrations “drawn from” or “after” photographs;
sentimental images are intermingled with floor plans and building designs.
These can be safely read as postcards along a voyage through poverty, in
5 Compare this photo to Thomson’s “ The Crawlers.” Thomson's image is closely cropped,
directing attention to the woman and child and limiting any sense of context. Riis’s photo
utilizes the setting to underscore its allegory: the hat hanging above the woman suggests a
halo; the ladder suggests Jacob’s ladder and access to heaven; the white apron connotes
purity; the woman’s gaze upward indicates prayer. She sits on sacks presumably filled with
rags, a modern Madonna.
Figure 5 Jacob Riis: In the Home of an Italian
Rag Picker, Jersey Street
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230
which readers can participate from their armchairs. But the faces in the
photographs linger: the “Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement —
‘Five Cents a Spot’” or the workers
in “’Knee-Pants’ at Forty-Five Cents
a Dozen — A Ludlow Street
Sweater’s Shop” (fig. 8). Their
direct stares reveal subjects
exceeding the limits that the
photographer attempts to impose on them (and for which he sometimes paid
them). As Mitchell writes, “ The photographs may be ‘evidence’ for
propositions quite at odds with the official uses that Riis wants to put them”
(286).
The Dickensian model for documenting the poor— its blend of
“realism” with sympathy — and its effect on photo documentary was severely
challenged by Modernism. In large part, this can be attributed to a changed
attitude towards language itself; “Modernism was in awe of the Word, an
awe matched only by its total mistrust of what words had come to mean in
Figure 8 Jacob Riis: "Knee-Pants" at
Forty-Five Cents a Dozen - a Ludlow
Street Sweater's Shop
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231
the bourgeois world ...it was up to photography to rescue whatever lyric
lament was still there” (Codrescu 1). Ironically, the great Modernist
photographer Walker Evans, who, like Dickens and Riis, found a wealth of
material in the Five Points area of Manhattan, attributed his style to literary
inspiration: not Dickens (although he owned a copy of American Notes), but
Flaubert and Baudelaire.
I wasn’t very conscious of it then, but I know now that
Flaubert’s aesthetic is absolutely mine. Flaubert’s
method I think I incorporated almost unconsciously, but
anyway used it in two ways: his realism and naturalism
both, and his objectivity of treatment; the non-
appearance of author; the non-subjectivity. That is
literally applicable to the way I want to use the camera
and do. But spiritually, however, it is Baudelaire who is
the influence on me. ... I consider him the father of
modern literature, the whole modem movement, such as
it is.(qtd. in Katz 122)6
While Dickens asserts the superiority of the author over his poor subjects,
and both Thomson and Riis in their photographs manipulate and
6 Hersey wrote that in the mid-twenties, Evans “ went to Paris, hoping to write; he audited at
the Sorbonne, read Flaubert and Baudelaire, and gazed at James Joyce from across the
room in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, but found he couldn’t for the life of him haul words up out
of the deep well of his reserve” (xv).
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232
aggressively control theirs, Evans encourages his subjects to stare back.
John Hersey describes the photographer’s methods in producing the
photographs of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
In Setting up a group photograph, Evans would let his
subjects assemble and arrange themselves in any way
they wished, and he would take his picture only when
they were at ease and fully conscious of the camera eye
staring straight at them, at home in their setting and in
command of themselves. He bestowed on the objects in
the families’ homes a similar tact and respect, as if
things too had the right to defend themselves against the
lens. The resulting photographs did not propagandize
squalor; they gave full scope to the timeless dignity,
beauty, and pain of rounded lives, (xxvii)
The photographs were published without captions or direct comment. They
appear at the start of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, rather than
interspersed with the text. Agee prefaces his text with a warning:
The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text,
are coequal, mutually independent, and fully
collaborative. By their fewness, and by the impotence of
the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of
that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the
interests, however, of the history and the future of
photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat
statement necessary, (xlvii)
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233
In Agee’s plan, what the photographs communicate the “immeasurable
weight in actual existence” (12), as would “ fragments of cloth, bits of cotton,
lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors,
plates of food and of excrement” (13). The author steps aside to let
things/appearances speak. Agee contrasts his intention with that of fiction:
In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his
existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a
person has only the most limited of his meaning through
me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists,
in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no
character of the imagination can possibly exist. His
great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact. As for
me, I can tell you of him only what I saw, only so
accurately as in my terms I know how .... (12)
While earlier photo documentaries emphasized text over photographs, the
theory that informs Let Us Now Praise Famous Men does the opposite. The
camera accepts that the “singular and contingent” needs to be read as both
unstable and yet universal.
In contrast to the record of rural life in Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, Walker Evans is also known for his city photographs, many of which
were taken of unsuspecting subjects. In an unpublished draft text to
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234
accompany a 1962 volume of
subway portraits taken in the 1940s
with a hidden camera, he
confesses being a “penitent spy
and an apologetic voyeur,” guilty of
“rude and impudent invasion” (qtd.
in Walker Evans at Work 160).
Perhaps it is this role which causes
him to acknowledge the continued validity of Dickens’s project: he predicts
that “ The crashing non-euphoria of New York subway life may some day be
recorded by a modern Dickens or Daumier.”
Hersey writes that Evans “developed a style distinctly his own, based
on a strict standard: he must let his eye and the camera’s lens discover
reality, not fabricate it” (xvi). This can be seen in one of his signature
images, “License Photo Studio, New York” (fig. 9), taken in Five Points in
1934. The photograph records the texts others have created; it crops rather
than composes. Evans’s task is to frame the subject, not dictate it. Of
Figure 9 Walker Evans: License
Photo Studio, New York (1934)
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235
course, that is easier with architecture and advertising than with humans. As
a flaneur hiding a camera to produce his early photos, his methods echo the
work of both Dickens and Riis. He at least admits that his “documentary
style” had more to do with art than fact:
Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and
misleading word. And not really clear. You have to
have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. The term
should be documentary style. An example of a literal
document would be a police photograph of a murder
scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is
really useless. Therefore art is never a document, but it
certainly can adopt that style. I’m sometimes called a
“documentary photographer,” but that presupposes quite
a subtle knowledge of the distinction I’ve just made,
which is rather new. (qtd. in Katz 127)
Little can be said to be subtle about Dickens’s style, or, for that matter,
Thomson and Smith’s, or Riis’s. While Dickens’s primary purpose may have
been to entertain, like Street Life in London and How the Other Half Lives,
his observations helped move others to mitigate the squalor they recorded.
Their works set out to be useful, to place before their audiences city views
which few had seen before, to capture lives which may otherwise have been
forgotten or ignored. They establish a model to which Walker Evans
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responds — a full century after the development of photography, his
audience is sophisticated enough to see for themselves.
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237
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Asset Metadata

Creator Kort, Melissa Sue (author)

Core Title Facing the camera: Dickens, photography, and the anxiety of representation

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Howe, Eunice (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-100552

Unique identifier UC11337829

Identifier 3027735.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-100552 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3027735.pdf

Dmrecord 100552

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kort, Melissa Sue

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA