The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America by Peter John Brownlee

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America by Peter John Brownlee David Henkin (bio) Keywords Vision, Perception, Visual culture The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America. By Peter John Brownlee. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 264. Cloth, $45.00.) Despite the success of environmental and cultural historians in reconstructing the broader sensorium of the nineteenth century, eyesight remains a particular preoccupation in the study of urban life in the early [End Page 156] American republic. Visual culture, the focus of much interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1990s, takes center stage in two important recent contributions to the field, Justin Clark's City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018) and Amy Lippert's Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford, UK, 2018), books whose quite different interests in the act of looking confirm the enduring link between cities and sight. Peter Brownlee's striking new book, The Commerce of Vision, joins this chorus line. Although various biases and predispositions might explain the focus on vision in historical scholarship more generally (the sensory orientations of modern Westerners, the disproportionate dependence of historians on visible source material, and the expanding purview of the discipline of art history), studies of nineteenth-century U.S. cities have turned toward the visual out of a more specific recognition that these urban environments were places where seeing mattered especially. Influenced by Georg Simmel's and Walter Benjamin's portraits of nineteenth-century (European) cities as sites of fleeting gazes, impersonal relations, and capitalist display, where eyes worked harder than ears, histories of urban culture in the United States stress such themes as illumination, observation, surveillance, monumental projection, and, above all, spectacular consumption. Brownlee's contribution adds a neglected component to this picture. To fully grasp the urban spectacle, he proposes, we need to examine urban spectacles. Eyes were the targets of an intensifying barrage of advertising, exhibition, instruction, and entertainment, Brownlee observes, and they drew rising concern for their health and fitness. Introduced in the medieval period, corrective spectacles grew more common over the first half of the century in the United States, "valued for … what they communicated about the status" of their wearers (72). Moving smoothly from ophthalmological discourse to the optical trade, the first part of The Commerce of Vision narrates this development well, highlighting the role of Philadelphia opticians, advertisers, artists, and cultural critics in the increasing acceptance of eyewear and the process by which "correct vision became a central component of bourgeois selfhood in a market system that placed new demands on the eyes of its participants" (72). Those new demands were specifically textual, however, which is part of what distinguishes Brownlee's book from many other exemplars of the visual turn in urban history. Whereas the category of visual culture in [End Page 157] Clark's Boston serves to distinguish images and sights from texts, and whereas visual culture in Lippert's San Francisco contrasts photographs and lithographs with live encounters, the visual landscape that interests Brownlee consists almost entirely of printed words. Big words, tiny words, distant words, occluded words—these were the sights that urban eyes needed help perceiving. Cultivating correct vision entailed learning how to read the texts distributed and displayed, often chaotically, in urban space. The second part of the book pivots to that chaos, showing how broadsides and posters adopted and adapted fatter typefaces in order to be visible at a distance, while embracing patterns of layout and composition to meet the shifting vantage points of mobile observers (97). The sturdier signboards covering building facades in Philadelphia and New York pursued similar strategies, producing in the process "a syntax premised on distraction" (121). The designers and producers of commercial signage were thus in the same business as the opticians, trying to adjust for the ocular challenges of modern city living and train a new generation of urban consumers in proper vision. But the proliferation of their works, of course, reinforced the disjunction of the cityscape and added to the visual obstacle course of urban living. The final section of the book turns...