Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory

Already the Past

Jennifer Green-Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

Analysing a broad range of texts by inventors, cultural critics, photographers, and novelists, this book argues that Victorian photography ultimately defined the concept of memory for generations to come – including our own.

The book will be of interest to students of Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture and intellectual history, as well as scholars working within the emerging field of research at the intersection of photographic and literary studies.

PART ONE
The Photograph in Time

CHAPTER ONE
Photography in the Age of Oblivion

On January 6, 1839, the Paris newspaper Gazette de France had a terrific scoop with the story of “an important discovery made by M. Daguerre, the celebrated painter of the Diorama.” Although the journalist responsible could hardly have imagined just how important that discovery was going to be, nor how often his piece on it would be quoted in the decades and centuries to come, he had plenty of enthusiasm for his subject:

This discovery seems like a prodigy. It disconcerts all the theories of science in light and optics, and, if borne out, promises to make a revolution in the arts of design.

M. Daguerre has discovered a method to fix the images which are represented at the back of a camera obscura; so that these images are not the temporary reflection of object, but their fixed and durable impress, which may be removed from the presence of those objects like a picture or an engraving.

Let our readers fancy the fidelity of the image of nature figured by the camera obscura, and add to it an action of the solar rays which fixes this image, with all its gradations of lights, shadows, and middle tints, and they will have an idea of the beautiful designs, with a sight of which M. Daguerre has gratified our curiosity. M. Daguerre cannot act on paper; he requires a plate of polished metal. It was on copper that we saw several points of the Boulevards, Pont Marie, and the environs, and many other spots, given with a truth which Nature alone can give to her works. M. Daguerre shews you the plain plate of copper: he places it, in your presence, in his apparatus, and, in three minutes, if there is a bright summer sun, and a few more, if autumn or winter weaken the power of its beams, he takes out the metal and shews it to you, covered with a charming design representing the object towards which the apparatus was turned. Nothing remains but a short mechanical operation—of washing, I believe—and the design, which has been obtained in so few moments, remains unalterably fixed, so that the hottest sun cannot destroy it.¹

¹Hippolyte Gaucharaud, “The Daguerotype” [sic]. Gazette de France (January 6, 1839); translated and republished by London’s Literary Gazette (January 12, 1839), 28.

No matter that the daguerreotype was fragile, idiosyncratic, or that as yet its image could not be reproduced. For this writer, as for the hundreds of other excited people who in July reportedly “swarmed” Paris’s Palais de l’Institut to hear how Daguerre had made his “miraculous pictures,”² the point of the process, and the primary reason for interest in its story, had to do with one thing: the “charming designs” were “durable … unalterably fixed.” The long-desired ability to preserve images cast by light through a lens figuratively signaled the end of mutability and the beginning of a world in which there would be no passing away, or, more precisely, no unmarked passing. Small wonder that it captured the imagination. “The new art,” London’s Literary Gazette observed, “has been discovered to fix these wonderful images, which have hitherto passed away volatile—evanescent as a dream—to stop them at our will … and render them permanent before our eyes.”³

²“The Daguerre Secret,” Literary Gazette (July 13, 1839), 538–39.

³“French Discovery—Pencil of Nature,” Literary Gazette (February 2, 1839), 74.

As it turned out, the process of permanently fixing the image needed some refinement. One of the first authors of a book-length history on photography wrote a mere four years later: “Since the publication of the photogenic processes, every one, and Mr. Daguerre among the first, acknowledged that something yet remained to be done, to give to these marvelous images that degree of perfection, which it is now possible to obtain: I mean the fixing of the impressions.”⁴ In early 1839, Daguerre’s method of producing pictures on copper sheets with silver iodine remained secret as he negotiated a purchase price with the government for its release,⁵ while in England, Sir John Herschel worked on finding a chemical that might fix images on sensitized paper. He soon discovered, as his notes record, that “hyposulphite of soda … Succeeds perfectly.”⁶ With Herschel’s permission, his friend Henry Fox Talbot described the discovery of “hypo” in a letter published by the French Academy of Sciences, and Daguerre adapted the technique for his own use.

⁴N. P. Lerebours, A Treatise on Photography, trans. J. Egerton (London: 1843), 53.

⁵ventually, according to Newhall, “a proposal was made to Daguerre and Isidore Niépce [son of Nicéphore, Daguerre’s partner, who had died in 1833]: as recompense for granting the state the right to publish the inventions, they would be awarded generous annuities for life.” Newhall, History, 23.

⁶Newhall, History, 21.

Talbot’s own accounts of the distinctly different process of “photogenic drawing” return obsessively to the theme of permanence. Images made some thirty years earlier by his predecessors in science, Sir Humphry Davy and Thomas Wedgwood, could be examined only briefly and in the dark, lest they vanish altogether. In Talbot’s early work with sensitized paper he had anxiously anticipated similar losses:

I expected that a kind of image … would be produced, resembling to a certain degree the object from which it was derived. I expected, however, also, that it would be necessary to preserve such images in a portfolio and to view them only by candlelight; because if by daylight, the same natural process which formed the images would destroy them, by blackening the rest of the paper.⁷

⁷W. H. Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or, The Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil.” 1839. Reprinted in Photography: Essays & Images: Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 23–31, 23.

Talbot’s initial results were indeed temporary. “The first attempts which I made became indistinct in process of time,” he recalled, with the result that “I thought that perhaps all these images would ultimately be found to fade away.”⁸ Throughout the 1830s, correspondence between Talbot and his family and friends is punctuated with disappointments that the charming “specimens” of his work had not lasted as their recipients had hoped. “Thank you very much for sending me such beautiful shadows,” wrote his sister-in-law Laura Mundy in 1834; “the little drawing I think quite lovely … I had no idea the art could be carried to such perfection—I had grieved over the gradual disappearance of those you gave me in the summer & am delighted to have these to supply their place in my book.”⁹ After Herschel’s discovery of hypo’s utility, however, the “little drawings” ceased fading away, and Talbot’s triumph in his paper process was, he felt, secure:

⁸Ibid., 24.

⁹Laura Mundy to W. H. Fox Talbot, December 12, 1834.

The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our “natural magic,” and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy … we may receive on paper the fleeting shadow, arrest it there and in the space of a single minute fix it there so firmly as to be no more capable of change.¹⁰

¹⁰Talbot, “Some Account,” in Newhall, Essays and Images, 25.

The desire to fix life and render it “no more capable of change” drives every representational and memorializing act; it isn’t limited to the history of photography and its well-known cast of characters, and nor does it originate in the nineteenth century.¹¹ Yet that desire seems to have been particularly acute when Victorian photography was emerging into the general consciousness. Only a few years before Daguerre’s announcement, and around the same time that Talbot was experimenting with simple wooden box cameras in the grounds of his home, Lacock Abbey, the geologist Charles Lyell foresaw the peculiar urgency of the Victorian will to stasis and predicted the fatigue of the modern imagination in the effort required to grasp new developments in science, most notably those having to do with the discovery of what John McPhee calls “deep time.”¹² By the 1830s, memory no longer defined the limits of history but was eclipsed by the conceptual void of oblivion, into which the present must fall as fast as the world moved toward the future. Human history was dwarfed by the incomprehensible magnitude of prehistory, and the modern world seemed to be moving faster, with the result that things tumbled “with increa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• AFTERLIGHT
• Introduction: "Stars from the Empty Sky"
• PART ONE THE PHOTOGRAPH IN TIME
• PART TWO THE PHOTOGRAPH AS TIME
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX