19th-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the pre-eminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over such topics as the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they being to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period.
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• List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction
• 1. E Pluribus Unum: History and Photographic Difference
• 2. Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor
• 3. Composing Gendered Selfhoods in Robert Louis Stevenson and Amy Levy
• 4. 'We do the rest': Photography, Labour and Howellsian Realism
• 5. 'Literature of Attractions': Jack London and Early Cinema Afterword Endnotes Bibliography Index.
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Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 looks at how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London, each of whom deals with the transition between photographic methodologies. The book argues that their writing can be analysed most fruitfully via a consideration of technological difference. Clayton examines how the transition between different methods affected the ways in which writers rethought photography. His central claim is that nineteenth-century authors were more aware of the particularities of different technologies than has previously been realised. Literature and Photography in Transition contributes to a better understanding of how nineteenth-century writers negotiated visual technologies. It provides a new means by which scholars can read the relationship between literature and early photography.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of illustrations--
• 1. Introduction--
• 2. Nostalgia and Poetic Idylls in Early Victorian Photographic Discourse--
• 3. Wordsworthian Afterlives and Photographic Nostalgia--
• 4. Scott, Technology, and Nostalgic Reinvention--
• 5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Photography, and the Afterlife of Poetry--
• 6. Cameron, Tennyson, and the Luxury of Reminiscing--
• 7. Literary Ephemera and the Timeless Image in Late Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture--
• 8. Afterword-- Bibliography.
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This book traces the various ways in which Victorian writers, photographers, publishers, and consumers translated the idea of photography into an ideal of arrested time. The possibility of arresting time was the symbolic currency of all those in the business of selling poetry to a wider audience through popular forms such as the gift books, travel guides, magic lantern shows, working men's editions of verse, celebrity portraits, memorabilia, and mementos. Beginning with an analysis of early photographic reviewing cultures and the first photographically illustrated verse anthologies to be published in England, Helen Groth then traces the cultural permutations of literary and cultural nostalgia that the work of poets such as Wordsworth, Scott, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and lesser-known poets such as Augusta Webster and Agnes Mary Frances. Robinson inspired Victorian photographers, publishers, and critics alike.
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• Shared lines - pen and pencil as trace-- visual narratives-- the art of seeing - Dickens in the visual market-- portraits of the author-- the empty biscuit tin.
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Literary culture in the 19th century drew on a partnership between the textual and visual. Early in the century the line made by the pencil (the visual/artistic) and that made by the pen (the textual) were united in the Victorian mind. Many of the period's artists, writers and critics saw a common origin for visual and textual graphics (the primary tools of communication in the period) in precursors like pictographs and hieroglyphs. This volume explores these literary and artistic perceptions, and these partnered graphic lines, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It offers a multivalent outlook on a textual-visual relationship that flourished from the early part of the 19th century through to the beginning of the 20th. The "image" of the Victorian text was manifest in various forms: portraits of authors, paintings of contemporary life, graphic illustration, graphic text such as advertising, calligraphy and typography, book binding, and the book as a cultural artifact. While each chapter of this work explores a different aspect of this "visual" literacy, the chapters are linked by key themes and images: the book as an iconic object, the growing graphic presence of text, the role of the graphic trace, the "Sister-Arts/pen and pencil" tradition, and the competition between image and word as systems of communication.
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• Two texts, two hands, two looks-- contextual/bitextual - aesthetes, socialists, journalists-- quotation-- impression-- parody-- answering-- cross-dressing-- entr'acte.
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This is a detailed interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between text and image in "Fin-de-Siecle" first editions ranging from elite "belles-lettres" to popular mass-market books. Focusing on the power relations embedded in bitextual relationships, the book explores the context in which illustrated books were produced and received, situating the dialogue between image and text within the period's cultural discourses and their preoccupations with sex, knowledge and power. This study, which offers fresh approaches to illustration theory and to critical interpretation of late-Victorian texts, is illustrated in black and white and should be of interest to literary scholars, Victorian scholars and art historians.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)