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Victorian Negatives Literary Culture and the Dark Side of
Photography in the Nineteenth Century
Susan E. Cook
Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century SUNY Series Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019 Hardcover. xxxiv + 184 pp., 16 ill. ISBN 978-1438475370. $95
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
How old should Susan E. Cook’s readers be in order to
share her nostalgia for a time when a darkroom was still needed to make
photographic images appear? “At the center of the process stood the negative –
that essential inversion that made the print possible” [137]. While the
presence of photography in Victorian literature has already inspired a
considerable bibliography – Cook singles out Owen Clayton’s Literature and Photography in Transition,
1850-1915 (Palgrave, 2015), as
methodologically close to her own work – the volume published in 2019 by SUNY
Press focuses more specifically on the negative as a central characteristic of
the most widely used photographic devices during the second half of the 19th
century. An Associate Professor of English at the Southern New Hampshire
University, Susan E. Cook shows an in-depth knowledge of the material and
intellectual aspects of photography in the Victorian age, which allows her to
distinguish between various processes and genres, instead of taking the
invention as a monolithic block. As opposed to the Daguerreotype, which could
only deliver one original picture at a time, negative-based techniques made it
possible to endlessly multiply the same image, once the reversal of light and
darkness had been captured on a glass plate. Reproducibility and inversion were
the two main features of negatives, hence a whole lot of ethical and aesthetic
problems. Susan E. Cook quite brilliantly explores the different meanings of
the word “negative”, its photographic use being here examined in relation with
its moral or even grammatical value. The writers she studies expressed “how
negative technologies erode older ideals of representational truth as well as
ideas of singularity and artistic control. They do this by featuring failed or
troubled photographic reproduction within their works and challenging visual
objectivity obliquely and metaphorically across their oeuvres” [xvi]. Paradoxically enough, the first chapter of Victorian
Negatives is devoted to the Daguerreotype, a negative-less technique, as
said above, in relation with A Tale of Two Cities. Susan E. Cook starts
with a digression about celebrity culture as favoured by the development of
photography: Dickens contributed to his own worldwide fame by posing repeatedly
for professionals like John Edwin Mayall, but he also perceived as dangerous
the exposure linked to the circulation of endlessly multiplicable photographs.
Even if duplication is a central topic in A Tale of Two Cities, Cook finds
in it what she calls a “Daguerrean sensibility” [15] notably because Dickens’s
Anglo-French novel, which relies heavily on the opposition of light and
darkness, provides the reader with the same experience as the bright surface of
Daguerreotypes offered to viewers: “Dickens allows us to see the present in his
vision of the past, just as we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirrored
surface of a daguerreotype” [25]. Another Dickensian chapter follows, associating Little
Dorrit with solarization, a form of extreme overexposure which long
remained an accidental blunder before it was taken up as a deliberate technique
by such photographers as Man Ray. Just like solarized prints mix qualities of
positive and negative images, “Dickens circumvents inversion through an
implicit challenge to photographic objectivity more broadly” [28] in a novel
where light is not “metaphorically stable”, as confirmed by Phiz’s
illustrations. Both a devoted amateur photographer (he published a
dozen articles in the British Journal of Photography and other
periodicals in the 1880s) and, later, an ardent supporter of spirit photography
– a great embarrassment to his admirers who believed him to be a rational mind
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle curiously makes little use of this technology in his
Sherlock Holmes stories, or even undermines its power. A Scandal in Bohemia
shows “the failure of visual evidence” [61], the compromising photograph of
Irene Adler with the King representing “the threat of a woman – a woman who
cannot be contained through vision alone – and the threat of celebrity through
uncontrollable photographic reproduction. It also represents the threat of
inversion by showing the inversion of gender roles and roles between detective
and subject” since Holmes is eventually defeated by Adler disguised as a man
[72]. As a photographic process, double exposure enjoyed an
ambiguous status too, since it could be either a trick used to create “spirit
photographs” with supposedly otherworldly apparitions, or a blunder committed
by clumsy photographers who superimposed two negatives one over another. Cook
considers that it functioned just like a grammatical “double negative”.
Linguistically, “two negatives emphasize the negation, . . . cancel each other
out, or . . . produce an alternative that is not quite the same as a mere
reversal of the negative idea expressed” [74], and the same is true for
photography: two different negatives could be juxtaposed to strengthen the
resulting positive (as in stereoscopic views); their combination could ruin the
picture, resulting in an illegible image; and double exposure could also reveal
interesting new scenes. Moving away from realistic literature, Cooks applies
this theory to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and to The Picture of Dorian
Gray. Hyde is not simply the negative of Jekyll, since he is pure evil,
while the doctor is a more complex figure, having a knowledge of both good and
evil; the superposition of the two characters does not produce a convincing
whole. In Wilde’s Gothic story, neither is the portrait the mere negative of the
young man who posed for it; there is no symmetry between the original and the
reproduction, and it is not quite clear which is which. Even though they may
appear as negatives of commonly received wisdom, Lord Henry’s aphorisms do not
make a new positive appear. And just like Dorian could not control the
reproduction of his physiognomy, Wilde himself was dispossessed of his image
when New York photographer Napoleon Sarony asserted his rights over his
“creation”. In his Wessex novels, Thomas Hardy suggests that
photography is “an index of emotional attachment, but one that may easily be
misinterpreted” [115]. This applies in particular to Jude the Obscure,
in which the different characters liberally distribute photographs as gifts to
be later bartered away or destroyed. And Susan E. Cook wonders about the lack
of any postmortem photograph of Jude’s children: if this totally democratized
means of memorizing the dear departed had been resorted to, as was quite common
between the 1840s and 1880s, why should Sue need to uncover the faces of her
freshly buried children in order to see them again? Hardy uses photography as a
sign of absence, whose very absence becomes significant, just like the
(photographic) frontispieces of the 1912 collected edition of his Wessex novels
seem to show a reality which does not exist in fact, “fictions of
verisimilitude – lies of presence” [123]. Susan E. Cook concludes with a character who cannot be
photographed: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Inversion and reproducibility already
existed before 1839, but those qualities were highlighted by the invention of
negative-based techniques, and her stimulating book invites the reader to take
such effects into account. “Photography allows us to see that realism is an illusive
/ elusive whole constructed of the very things it purports not to be:
contingency, interpretation, the subjective, and the fragmentary” [xxv].
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