Abstract
Oliver Wendell Holmes and David Brewster both described stereoscopy in terms of its sculptural quality as a way of emphasising the haptic quality of viewing stereoscopic photographs. The phenomenal realism of the device augmented the indexical realism of photography. This article details the way that the stereoscope intervened in longstanding philosophical and scientific debates concerning the relationship between vision, touch and depth perception. It also unpicks the popular reception of the stereoscope in so far as explanations of its working became the subject of conflicting claims by opposing groups of scientists drawing on nativist and empiricist accounts of depth perception. Debates over the meaning of the stereoscope in the 1840s and 1850s caution against locating it simplistically as a new, disruptive way of seeing; rather, Brewster’s influence on popular explanations, achieved through his relentless work for the periodical press, suggests its pleasure drew heavily on traditional paradigms from optics and natural theology.
Two of the most prominent early enthusiasts for the stereoscope were the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Scottish natural philosopher David Brewster. Both designed their own hugely successful versions of the device and promoted stereography through prominent articles in the British and American periodical press. Writing in the Atlantic Review in 1861, Holmes declared that ‘none can dispute that we have a new and wonderful source of pleasure in the sun-picture, and especially in the solid sun-sculptures of the stereograph’. Footnote1 Brewster celebrated the stereoscope in similar terms, arguing that the material and tactile quality of three-dimensional pictures would be particularly valuable for sculptors, painters, architects and engineers. Footnote2 This association between sculpture and stereography is perhaps the strongest expression of the way that the phenomenal realism of the device augmented the indexical realism of photography: the stereoscope gave photography a new haptic, material dimension. As late as 1909, Albert Underwood, founder of Underwood and Underwood, the principal seller of stereographs in America and Britain from 1880 to 1920, could be found promoting the tactility of stereographs as an improvement upon the flatness and abstraction of photographs: ‘By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels around it and gets an idea of its solidity’. Footnote3
Patrizia Di Bello’s essay in this issue similarly demonstrates the creative affinities between sculpture and stereoscopy, vision and touch. Whereas Di Bello explores the function of stereographs at the 1862 International Exhibition, detailing the way in which they modelled and reproduced the three-dimensional form of the sculptures exhibited, my essay argues that the sculptural quality of stereoscopy is part of its refiguring of the Victorian sensorium, and, more particularly, exemplifies the way that the device shifted conceptions of the relationship between vision and touch. It builds on the recent critical turn towards excavating the embodied and phenomenal experiences of nineteenth-century culture; shifts in the history of senses provide a fruitful means of tracing the impact of industrialisation and modernity on everyday life and the individual. Di Bello and Luisa Calè provide an effective summation of this approach when they set themselves against the objectivity of Mathew Arnold’s claim that the critic should seek to ‘see the object as it really is’, declaring their preference for ‘the tangible qualities of media, and for embodied modes of engagement with the practices of viewing, reading, collecting, and being with objects in the nineteenth century’. Footnote4 From its inception, stereoscopy was always already marked out for its tangibility: this was its principal attraction, and, as such, emphasises the period’s own desire for an embodied visuality.
The stereoscope was first described by Charles Wheatstone, Professor of Experimental Physics at Kings College, in a paper given to the Royal Society in June 1838, although his initial research took place as early as 1832. Footnote5 Before it achieved commercial prominence in the 1850s, the device provoked fierce scientific and philosophical arguments concerning whether it significantly changed understandings of sensory perception. Critics, most notably Jonathan Crary, have argued that the growth of interest in physiological optics in the 1820s and 1830s, and concomitant devices such as the stereoscope, challenged the positivism of enlightenment conceptions of a stable, transparent, external world. Footnote6 In contrast to the Newtonian model in which a passive beholder observes and receives a self-present world, the stereoscope emphasised the subjectivity of vision, and was thus part of the new flux and instability of modern perception. Crary is right in many ways, but a secondary aim of this essay is to demonstrate that, rather than the stereoscope being part of a rupture with the enlightenment tradition of geometrical optics, the device became the subject of conflicting interpretations from two scientific camps, which had antithetical explanations of binocular vision and spatial perception. Crary overplays the dominance of the Newtonian tradition by not paying enough attention to the longstanding influence of empiricist accounts, deriving principally from Locke and Berkeley, but reiterated, albeit with modifications, by numerous eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century natural history treatises as well as a variety of related scientific articles. Footnote7
It is because of the longstanding explanation of spatial perception in terms of the relationship between vision and touch that the advent of the stereoscope resulted in sight seeming to appropriate to itself what had formerly been the realm of touch. The most significant early example of this is the famous problem posed by William Molyneux (1656–98) to John Locke (1632–1704): if a person had been born blind and suddenly recovered his sight, would he be able to tell apart, by sight alone, a globe and a cube, which he had formerly distinguished by touch alone? Molyneux, whose wife was blind, thought he would not, as did Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke declared it was an occasion for his reader ‘to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them’. Footnote8 In other words, it was only through visual experience, allied with touch, that we come to understand the nature of solidity and depth in the three-dimensional world.
The empiricist position on depth perception was taken up in more detail by George Berkeley in his New Theory of Vision (1709), in which he argued that the distance of objects was associated with different sensations: ‘the Mind has, by constant Experience, found the different Sensations corresponding to the different Dispositions of the Eyes, to be attended each, with a Different Degree of Distance in the Object’. Footnote9 Contra Descartes’s account that spatial perception was innate and immediate to the eye, a school of thought subsequently labelled as nativist, Berkeley and other idealists argued that the mind learnt by experience its knowledge of distance and three-dimensionality. According to Berkeley, only through touch were we able to realise the objects are not just surfaces – that they consist of length, breadth and thickness. Significantly, the perception of space and binocular vision in the early nineteenth century was still often explained with reference to Berkeley. In Parlour Magic (1838), a popular book of rational recreations published in the same year as Wheatstone’s seminal paper, one section posed the longstanding question of why we do not see double: ‘The answer is, it is a matter of habit. Habit alone teaches us, that the sensations of sight correspond to any thing external, and shows to what they correspond’. Footnote10 Parlour Magic thus asserts the standard idealist position that it is through experience that we can understand that two-dimensional projections on the retina correspond with the objects of an external world. (By the book’s fifth edition of 1861, however, this section had been replaced by a discussion of the stereoscope and an explanation of depth perception in terms of binocular vision.) Footnote11 That the empirical tradition continued to feed into accounts of the stereoscope is also evident in the well-known essay by Holmes, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, which begins its section describing the stereoscope by asserting that there was good reason to believe ‘that the appreciation of solidity by the eye is purely a matter of education’. Footnote12 Holmes goes on to describe the oft-cited example described by the pioneering surgeon William Cheselden (1688–1752) of a young man recovering from a cataract removal who had to learn to recognise depth. Holmes cites the words of Cheselden’s patient who declared, in his immediate postoperative state, that ‘all objects whatever touched his eyes, as what he felt did his skin’: his vision was imbued with the sensuousness of touch. Footnote13
The influence of empirical explanations of spatial perception is important because it produced conflicting accounts of what the stereoscope actually demonstrated. It was not that the device represented a superseding of geometric optics by a more idealist and/or psychological approach; crucially, it was itself the cause of a conflict between these different approaches, and this was played out through antithetical empirical and nativist explanations. An 1858 essay in the Edinburgh Review by the renowned physician William Carpenter provides a succinct overview of the controversy caused by the conflicting views on depth perception:
one party contending for the sufficiency of physical applications, whilst the other affirms that their solution lies altogether within the domain of metaphysics, neither optics nor physiology having anything to do with it. Thus it has come to pass that one set of philosophers has reasoned upon the phenomena of vision, as if the retinal pictures formed by the optical instrumentality of the eye were daguerreotyped (so to speak) on the mind, just as the photographer transfers the picture obtained by his camera from one ‘sensitive surface’ to another: whilst another set has gone so far as to deny that we have any true idea either of the relative places or of the actual forms of objects, save what we acquire from the combination of tactile with visual experience, and to affirm that the infant really does see objects inverted until he has learnt the truth by handling them. Footnote14
Thus, on one side were those who argued, following the traditional principles of physical optics, that the eye perceived distance and depth directly. The pictures formed on the retina were thereby directly transmitted to the mind, which played little active role. Brewster’s definition of the law of visible direction exemplifies this passivity; as he put it in 1830:
we know nothing more than that the mind, residing, as it were, in every point on the retina, refers the impression made upon it at each point to a direction coinciding with the last portion of the ray which conveys the impression. Footnote15
In contrast, those influenced by the empirical approach stressed the interpretative role of learnt experience, downplaying the primacy of the eye in favour of touch.
The disagreement over the interpretation of the stereoscope crystalised around the conflicting approaches of Brewster and Wheatstone. Footnote16 Wheatstone’s concern with the role of mind and learnt experience drew, to some degree, on the empiricist tradition. In contrast, Brewster saw the binocular depth perception demonstrated by the stereoscope as a direct refutation of Berkeley. Rather than marking a break with enlightenment optics, Brewster actually used the stereoscope to further valorise the primacy of the eye as the ideal optical instrument. The conflict between Wheatstone and Brewster is key to understanding the sometimes contrary descriptions of the stereoscope in popular culture. Wheatstone’s 1838 paper intervened in the enduringly contentious debate upon depth perception by contradicting Brewster’s recent account of a particular optical illusion, and, more significantly, the scientific paradigm that produced his explanation. In 1826, Brewster published an essay in the Edinburgh Journal of Science on spatial perception, which focused on the propensity to see cameos as intaglios and vice versa. This optical illusion was noticed at an early meeting of the Royal Society of London, when members were looking at a guinea coin through a new compound microscope. Some of them saw the head on the coin as raised, and some as depressed. Footnote17 For Brewster and Wheatstone, this illusion became a test case for their conflicting models of spatial perception. Brewster’s explanation followed previous accounts in that he ascribed the cause of illusion to the lens that inverted the direction of the shadow produced by the object (in this interpretation, the illusion was thus most effective when the seal was illuminated from one side by a candle or window). The inverted shadow caused the depressions of the seal to be perceived as raised, and the viewer consequently misinterpreted the seal as a cameo rather than an intaglio:
It cannot therefore be doubted, that the optical illusion of the conversion of a cameo into an intaglio, and of an intaglio into a cameo, by an inverting eye-piece, is the result of an operation of our own minds, whereby we judge of the forms of bodies by the knowledge we have acquired of light and shadow. The greater our knowledge is, of this subject, the more readily does this illusion seize upon us; while, if we are but imperfectly acquainted with the effects of light and shadow, the more difficult is it to be deceived. Footnote18
For Brewster, the illusion thus stems not from the eye, which sees accurately, but from the mind, which misinterprets the visual cues based on its experience of the distribution of light and shade. In Brewster’s interpretation, the illusion is not imminent to subjectivity. It is psychological rather than physiological and does not challenge the primacy of the eye. Brewster’s explanation acknowledges the role of learnt experience only to demonstrate its fallibility.
Wheatstone’s paper offered an antithetical interpretation; he claimed that the cameo–intaglio illusion was caused not by learnt experience but by the indeterminate nature of vision itself. He hypothesised that the cameo–intaglio reversal could take place without illumination and without a lens. His crucial realisation was that a cameo and intaglio of the same object – where the elevations of one correspond to the depressions of the other – had the same projection on the retina when seen with one eye. When the cameo or intaglio was seen with both eyes, it was impossible to mistake an elevation for a depression. Yet when present to one eye only this binocular perspective was obviously lost. Whether the seal was perceived as a cameo or intaglio depended on the mind necessarily making a judgement because of the imperfect information supplied by one eye. If both the figure and its converse were familiar, then it was ‘perceived at one time distinctly as one of these figures, at another time as other, and while one figure continues it is not in the power of the will to change it immediately’. Footnote19 Wheatstone’s reasoning proceeded from the well-known illusion of geometrical figures, such as Necker’s cube, which could be interpreted as their converse. Footnote20 Rather than the mind misinterpreting an accurate visual perception as Brewster posited, learnt experience actually had to fill in for the insufficiency of the eye. As Wheatstone argued: ‘the real cause of the phenomenon is to be found in the indetermination of the judgement arising from our more perfect means of judging being absent’. Footnote21 More mistakes were not made in monocular vision, such as by those who only had one eye, because of the number of external visual cues for judging depth and distance. Wheatstone’s model emphasises the active role of the viewing subject, and correspondingly a far more unstable being-in-the-world. What Wheatstone did with beautiful simplicity was to bring together two different aspects of the science of optics by demonstrating the profound link between binocular vision and depth perception.
Wheatstone’s use of the stereoscope’s ability to explore the agency of the mind in visual perception is evident in a number of further experiments described in his 1838 paper. For example, he claimed that when two squares or circles ‘differing obviously but not extravagantly in size’ were presented to analogous parts of the retinae, they were combined by the mind into a single perception. Footnote22 Wheatstone then investigated what happened when two completely different objects are presented to the left and right eye. He presented two discs with different letters inside them simultaneously to the left and right eyes: the result was that the letter perceived changed alternately from that seen by the left and right eyes but that was not ‘in power of the will to determine the appearance of either of the letters’. Footnote23 The aim of these different experiments was to determine the extent of the mind’s ability to interpret visual phenomena. Following his seminal 1838 paper, Wheatstone continued to develop his researches on the physiology of vision and mental phenomena, but he did not publish his second paper on the subject until 1852. Footnote24 Such sparing publication of his ideas, although he was busy making significant contributions to the development of telegraphy and electricity, contrasts with the stream of articles and reviews published by Brewster.
The contrary approaches of Wheatstone and Brewster demonstrate the continuance of two different approaches to visual perception, something ignored by existing scholarship. Moreover, this dispute matters because while Wheatstone’s insights had far greater long-term influence, Brewster’s ceaseless work for the periodical press meant popular explanations of the stereoscope more often than not reflected his position. As recent work on nineteenth-century science has demonstrated, the growth of popular publishing played a key role in shaping the type of scientific knowledge disseminated. Footnote25 Such work builds on the insight, best expressed by James Secord, that ‘the distinction between the making and the communicating of knowledge’ needs to be removed. Footnote26 Thus, while it might be expected that Wheatstone’s work – proven as more ‘accurate’ and ‘correct’ – would lead to a renewed emphasis on the contingent nature of vision, in many ways the reverse was true. The idealist position was turned inside out with periodical articles on the stereoscope often celebrating the primacy of the eye over touch.
In between Wheatstone’s two seminal papers, Brewster published numerous articles on binocular vision during the 1840s and early 1850s. Footnote27 He was also extremely active in promoting his views in scientific circles; for example, he gave papers on Berkeley’s theory of vision to the British Association in 1848 and 1849. Footnote28 Brewster’s researches sought to reassert the principles of physical optics either by incorporating Wheatstone’s insights into established paradigms or by highlighting perceived errors in his work. For example, while Brewster could not disprove Wheatstone’s demonstration of retinal disparity, and often praised its value, he nonetheless sought to undermine a fundamental part of his thesis:
In analysing Mr Wheatstone’s beautiful discovery, that in binocular vision we see all objects of three dimensions by means of two dissimilar images on the retina, I trust I have satisfied the Society that the dissimilarity of these two pictures is in no respect the cause of our vivid perception of such objects, but, on the contrary, an unavoidable accompaniment of binocular vision, which renders it less perfect than vision with one eye. Footnote29
Brewster is hereby claiming that the two dissimilar images seen in binocular vision are not the cause of three-dimensional spatial perception but simply an accompanying phenomenon. The obduracy of his approach is evident in the claim that the dissimilarity proved by Wheatstone actually demonstrates the superiority of monocular vision, upon which much Cartesian optics, and, of course, Renaissance perspective, was based.
Brewster used the stereoscope to argue for a nativist position where depth and distance were perceived directly by the eye; he wanted to prove ‘by the aid of binocular phenomena, and in opposition to the opinion of the most distinguished metaphysicians, that we actually see a third dimension in space’. Footnote30 Wheatstone’s research was assimilated so that it could further demonstrate the assumptions of natural theology – the eye was even more self-evidently the perfect optical instrument designed by God now that it was ‘proved’ to perceive three-dimensional space directly and innately. Brewster continued to reiterate his entrenched views, his opinions seemingly hardening with age. In 1852 he was still describing his own interpretation of the cameo–intaglio phenomenon in the North British Review and declaring that the physical laws of binocular vision ‘enable us to place in its true light the celebrated theory of vision on which Bishop Berkeley reared the ideal philosophy of which he was the founder’. Footnote31 His conflict with Wheatstone is also implicit in The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction, in which he denigrates the role of learnt experience: ‘That this vision of distance is not the result of experience is obvious from the fact that distance is seen as perfectly by children as by adults; and it has been proved by naturalists that animals newly born appreciate distances with the greatest correctness’. Footnote32 The book also put forward James Elliot, a teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh, as a contender for the inventor of the stereoscope, and Brewster subsequently unbecomingly publicised these claims through letters to The Times in October and November 1856. Although these allegations were comprehensively refuted by Wheatstone, the querulous Brewster did not rescind them.
Scientific discourse on the stereoscope, due mainly to Brewster’s disputatious and obdurate nature, was thus fissured between two contrasting approaches: one was broadly empirical, idealist and phenomenological; the other was nativist, material and geometrical. Yet these scientific debates – due to their being conducted through the pages of the Edinburgh Review, North British Review, and a host of other journals and books – achieved widespread dissemination. Popular explanations on the stereoscope were thus a combination of these two discourses, and, in most cases, not especially concerned with any contradiction. Writing in the Art Journal in 1856, Robert Hunt complained that: ‘we find a very general ignorance prevailing of the principles upon which this instrument is constructed, and still greater want of knowledge of the philosophy which it involves’. Footnote33 Laura Burd Schiavo has noted that when the stereoscope became commercially successful, it lost much of the phenomenological implications demonstrated by Wheatstone and stereo views were ‘contained in the language of fine arts as models of mimetic representation’. Footnote34 This is true to a degree, but it was not only commercialism per se that was the cause but the pervasive influence of Cartesian optics upon accounts published in the periodical press.
From the nativist standpoint of Brewster and others, the stereoscope’s demonstration of depth perception meant that binocular vision took on a haptic dimension. The eye could be said to touch the far-off scenes in the stereographs, producing the oft-proclaimed experience of an embodied realism that gave the experience of being at the scene. As Holmes noted, with stereographs ‘The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture’. Footnote35 Holmes’s promotion of the stereoscope stemmed from his belief in its haptic potential, claiming that through binocular vision ‘we clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hand, or with thumb and forefinger, and then we know it to be something more than surface’. Footnote36 For Holmes, the stereoscope demonstrated that sight had a sensuous aspect that had previously been assigned to touch.
Several other optical treatises took the stereoscope to mark a changed relationship between the senses. A revisionist account of Berkeley published in 1842 by the prominent philosopher Samuel Bailey claimed that the device ‘contrary to the testimony of the sense of touch’ proved that the perception of the third dimension of space by the sight is immediate, and independent of information acquired by any other sense. Footnote37 In another treatise, Thomas Wharton-Jones, Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London and Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution (1851–55), went further by suggesting that binocular vision should be conceived of in more haptic terms:
Our faculty of perceiving three dimensions of space – length, breadth, and thickness – used to be attributed by philosophers solely to the touch; the perception of solidity or depth being, they supposed, a faculty acquired merely by experience through that sense. It is quite true that, by the active exercise of touch – by moulding the hand around a solid body – we recognise its three dimensions […] But, on the other hand, it is quite true – and this is to be particularly remarked – that though by moulding the hand around a solid body we can recognise its three dimensions, we cannot by simple touch – that is, by contact of the skin with a solid body – recognise any more than the two dimensions of length and breadth. Again, it is also quite true that though by means of one eye we can recognise truly length and breadth only, we can, if we look with two eyes at a solid body near us, perceive its three dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness, as certainly and demonstrably as we can by the touch when moulding the hand around the object. Footnote38
Wharton-Jones, whose approach to optics was akin to that of Brewster, suggests that the stereoscope – through its apparent demonstration that binocular vision meant the eyes perceived space and distance directly – refuted Berkeley. In so doing, vision became haptic and sensuous. Brewster, too, in keeping with his belief in the primacy of the eye, used his interpretation of the stereoscope to assert the dominance of vision over touch. In the first description of his new lenticular stereoscope in 1849, he proudly declared that ‘The sense of sight, therefore, instead of being the pupil of the sense of touch, as Berkeley and others have believed is, in this case, its teacher and its guide’. Footnote39
The haptic nature of the viewing experience of the stereoscope promoted by popular articles and reviews is invariably characterised as positive, an implicit overcoming of the abstraction of the self from the world. Ascribing a more sensuous aspect to vision eliminates the gap between subject and object. New media theorist Lev Manovich has pointed out that Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio see this lack of detachment as a characteristic of modern visual technology. Footnote40 Benjamin famously defined aura as ‘the unique phenomenon of distance’, whereas the aim of mechanical reproduction was to ‘bring things “closer” spatially and humanly’. Footnote41 Virilio has similarly argued that the drive for tele-presence in modern communications technology is eroding spatial conceptions of distance such that ‘the old line of the horizon curls itself inside the frame of the screen’. Footnote42 For Manovich, Benjamin and Virilio perceive the ‘progressive diminishing and, finally, the complete elimination of something that both writers see as a fundamental condition of human perception – spatial distance, the distance between the subject who is seeing and the object being seen’. Footnote43 In contrast to the dominant tendency to read this distance negatively, as a means for the subject to objectify and define the ‘other’ as an object, both Benjamin and Virilio interpret this distance positively. It preserves material order, a local context. Removing it can be simply another means of domination. A more haptic dimension of vision is not necessarily any less objectifying than the abstract gaze. Di Bello’s article similarly argues that stereographs of the 1862 sculptures created a kind of ideal, phantasmagorical exhibition, which, on the one hand, allowed a kind of touching impossible for actual visitors, but, conversely, bracketed ‘out aesthetic experience from social context and interactions’. Footnote44
Benjamin and Virilio suggest a critical interpretation of the embodied viewing of the stereoscope, particularly given its use for providing views of far-off sites or the popularity of pornographic stereographs. While offering a more immediate access to the non-local world, it did so at the cost of ripping the viewed scenes from their context. Brewster’s work suggests, for example, that rather than the stereoscope overcoming the abstraction of Cartesianism, it marked a further fetishisation of vision. The appeal of the instrument could be regarded as stemming from a deep-seated western desire to erode the gap between the viewing subject and non-local object, particularly as the device gained success during a period marked by globalisation and colonialism. Holmes is disturbingly revealing here: his essay describes the aim to produce stereographs of ‘every conceivable object of Nature and Art’ as akin to that of a game hunt. Photographers would acquire ideal forms as if they were skins: ‘Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth’. Footnote45 The form/skin would be ripped from the body: the matter did not matter. Except, of course, in hunting, the body is nonetheless killed. Holmes’s domineering trope suggests the ontological violence inflicted upon materiality by the pursuit of stereographs for the comfortable drawing rooms of America and Europe.
Holmes’s essay exemplifies the contrary nature of a device whose appeal was embodied yet idealist, democratic yet dominating. The haptic mode of viewing of the stereoscope is complemented by the ideal nature of the stereographs themselves. In terms that would have deeply irritated Brewster, Holmes celebrates photographic stereographs for providing an escape from materialism in that they made the forms of the whole world available:
Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Footnote46
Holmes asserts a dematerialised world where only form matters. The coupling of the realism of photography – able to capture any form of the world before it – with the phenomenological three-dimensional realism of binocular vision sloughed off the materiality of things even as vision was made tactile and material. It was the ideal nature of stereographs that led Holmes to proclaim the democratic potential of the device: ‘Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable’. Footnote47 There is only one Pantheon or Coliseum but an infinite number of reproductions. He envisages a grand future of comprehensive imperial, national and city stereographic libraries where users could go to see the form of any natural or artificial object. Holmes, like Brewster, believed in the stereoscope’s educational and democratic potential as a tele-visual system of storing and disseminating visual information. Stereographs could cheaply transport every scene of the world. They could be made available to all; yet it was only the haptic mode of viewing of the device that meant these ideal forms could fill in for matter itself.
Holmes’s pronouncement of stereography as ‘sun-sculpture’ thus has many echoes in other contemporary descriptions. The oft-repeated advertising cry of the London Stereoscopic Company – ‘Seems Madam, NAY IT IS!’ – is yet another variant of the supposed tactile, embodied appeal of stereographs. Footnote48 Photography was crucial in facilitating the commercial success of stereoscopy, in that it was able to provide large numbers of pictures that accurately replicated the natural position of the left and right eye; however, as this article has attempted to demonstrate, the discursive shape of the stereoscope’s three-dimensional ‘realism’ is more convoluted and disputed than is often realised, and is deeply influenced by the long genealogy of scientific debates over depth perception. Isobel Armstrong has noted that the modernity of the period was often characterised in terms of the ‘the status of the image, the nature of mediation (or bringing about of a changed state), and the problem of knowledge and perceptual certainty’. Footnote49 The stereoscope certainly contributed to these concerns, but contemporary debates over its meaning caution against locating it simplistically as a new, disruptive way of seeing; rather, Brewster’s influence on popular explanations suggests its pleasure drew heavily on traditional paradigms from optics and natural theology. Footnote50 The proclaimed novelty of its haptic, sensuous, sculptural mode of viewing was as much the forceful assimilation of touch by sight as a positive overcoming of the abstraction of visuality.
Notes
1. Email for correspondence: [email protected] 1 – Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Sun Painting and Sun Sculpture’ (1861), in Soundings from the Atlantic, Boston: Ticknor and Fields 1864, 176–7.
2. 2 – See David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction, London: John Murray 1856, 183–8.
3. 3 – Albert Underwood, The Stereograph and the Stereoscope With Special Maps and Books forming a Travel System. What They Mean for Individual Development. What They Promise for the Spread of Civilization, New York: Underwood and Underwood 1909, 25.
4. 4 – Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Introduction’, in Illustration, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2010, 1.
5. 5 – See Charles Wheatstone, ‘To the Editor of The Times’, The Times (31 October 1856), 10.
6. 6 – Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992; and Laura Burd Schiavo, ‘From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope’, in New Media 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003, 113–38. See also John Plunkett, ‘Depth, Colour, Movement: Embodied Vision and the Stereoscope’, in Multimedia History: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett, Exeter: University of Exeter Press 2006, 155–72.
7. 7 – See Nicholas Wade, A Natural History of Vision, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998, 315–59.
8. 8 – John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), book 2, 90.
9. 9 – George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, Dublin: Printed by Aaron Rhames for Jeremy Pepyat 1709, 10.
10. 10 – Parlour Magic: A Manual of Amusing Experiments, Transmutations, Sleights and Subtleties, Legerdemain, &c., London: Whitehead and Company 1838, 13.
11. 11 – Parlour Magic: A Manual of Amusing Experiments, Transmutations, Sleights and Subtleties, Legerdemain, &c., 5th edition, London: W. Kent and Co. 1861. For an example of the popular ascription of depth perception to experience, see also Wonders of Light and of Colour, London: [G. Morrish] 1890, 76.
12. 12 – Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, in Soundings from the Atlantic, 140.
13. 13 – Ibid.
14. 14 – [William Benjamin Carpenter], ‘Binocular Vision’, Edinburgh Review, 108 (1858), 438.
15. 15 – David Brewster, ‘Optics’, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Edinburgh: Blackwoods 1830, 615.
16. 16 – On this conflict, see also Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas Wade, London: Academic Press 1983; on Brewster, see ‘Martyr of Science’: Sir David Brewster 1781–1868, ed. A. D. Morrison Low and J. R. R. Christie, Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum 1984.
17. 17 – David Brewster, ‘On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, with an Account of other Analogous Phenomena’, Edinburgh Journal of Science, 4 (November 1825–April 1826), 99–108.
18. 18 – Ibid., 104.
19. 19 – Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision – Part the First. On some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 128 (1838), 381.
20. 20 – See L. A. Necker, ‘Observations on Some Remarkable Phenomena seen in Switzerland, and an Optical Phenomenon which Occurs on Seeing a Crystal or Geometrical Solid’, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine, 1:3rd ser. (1832), 329–57.
21. 21 – Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision – Part the First’, 384.
22. 22 – Ibid.
23. 23 – Ibid., 386.
24. 24 – Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision – Part the Second. On some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 142 (1852), 1–17.
25. 25 – See, especially, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. Louise Henson et al., Aldershot: Ashgate 2004; and Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2004.
26. 26 – James Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis, 95:4 (December 2004), 663–4.
27. 27 – David Brewster, ‘On the Law of Visible Position in Single and Binocular Vision, and on the Representation of Solid Figures by the Union of Dissimilar Plane Pictures on the Retina’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1844), 349–68. This essay was also republished in the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine in 1844. David Brewster, ‘On the Knowledge of Distance given by Binocular Vision’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 15 (1844), 663–74; David Brewster, ‘On the Conversion of Relief by Inverted Vision’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 15 (1844), 657–62; and [David Brewster], ‘Binocular Vision and the Stereoscope’, North British Review, 17 (1852), 165–204.
28. 28 – David Brewster, ‘An Examination of Bishop Berkeley’s “New Theory of Vision”’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray 1849, Part II, 49; David Brewster, ‘Additional Observations of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray 1850, Part II, 6.
29. 29 – Brewster, ‘On the Knowledge of Distance given by Binocular Vision’, 663.
30. 30 – [Brewster], ‘Binocular Vision and the Stereoscope’, 175.
31. 31 – Ibid., 201.
32. 32 – Brewster, The Stereoscope, 51.
33. 33 – Robert Hunt, ‘The Stereoscope’, Art Journal (April 1856), 118.
34. 34 – Schiavo, ‘From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision’, 145.
35. 35 – Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, 148.
36. 36 – Ibid., 142.
37. 37 – Samuel Bailey, A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, Designed to Show the Unsoundness of that Celebrated Speculation, London: James Ridgway 1842, 110.
38. 38 – Thomas Wharton Jones, On the Invention of Stereoscopic Glasses for Single Pictures: With Preliminary Observations on the Stereoscope, and On the Physiology of Stereoscopic Vision, London: John Churchill 1860, 20.
39. 39 – [David Brewster], ‘Description of Several New and Simple Stereoscopes for Exhibiting, as Solids, One or More Representations of them on a Plane’, Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, 3 (1851), 250.
40. 40 – Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2001, 171–5.
41. 41 – Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Fontana 1992, 225.
42. 42 – Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julian Rose, London: Verso 1997, 3.
43. 43 – Manovich, The Language of New Media, 171.
44. 44 – Patrizia Di Bello, ‘“Multiplying Statues by Machinery”: Stereoscopic Photographs of Sculptures at the 1862 International Exhibition’, in this issue.
45. 45 – Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, 162.
46. 46 – Ibid., 161.
47. 47 – Ibid., 162.
48. 48 – See also Anonymous, ‘A Word on the Stereoscope’, Leisure Hour, 3 (1858), 346–8.
49. 49 – Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008, 254.
50. 50 – On natural theology and the stereoscope, see T. L. Hankins and R. J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995, 148–177.