Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century, by Susan E. Cook

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century by Susan E. Cook Lindsay Smith (bio) Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century, by Susan E. Cook; pp. xxxiv + 183. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2019, $95.00, $32.95 paper. Photographic negatives are enigmatic things. They have become increasingly so with the shift to digital technologies. Celluloid reels with hole-punched edges pegged up to dry appear as but a memory of the red-lit darkroom, evoking the magic of that cell-like space. Susan E. Cook’s richly evocative Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century is rooted in the physical experience of the practitioner inhabiting that realm of developer, stop, fix, and wash, where exposure times and the material concerns over paper quality and chemical dilutions hold primary importance. At the same time, the book deals with less tangible qualities that haunt and emerge from the darkroom and that continue to infuse visual and verbal spheres long after that dark physical space has become unfamiliar to many. [End Page 442] The introduction sets out Cook’s approach that considers material and figurative qualities of the negative and the ways in which “the meanings it produces are articulated directly and indirectly through literary culture” (xxi). Her contention that “the photographic negative has shaped the way we see in ways we no longer see” has the appeal of being both obvious and not obvious at all (xxx). As Cook demonstrates, this claim brings with it a raft of questions about perceptual mediation, including photographic remediation by varieties of negatives together with their complex conceptual implications. The book’s five chapters are organized around literary texts by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Chapter 1 addresses the direct positive process of the daguerreotype in relation to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), exploring what the daguerreotype cannot do in the manner of the negative/positive process: namely, generate multiple copies of an original and restore the lateral inversion of the mirror. The literary analysis, along with discussion of the illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), is tied closely to the discomfort Dickens felt in having his photograph taken, which for him amounted to “a counterfeit presentment” (2). Cook further explores, in the context of literary celebrity, Dickens’s “anxiety” about a lack of control over the reproduction of his image, and the negative’s capacity to generate positives without the subject’s knowledge (3). Such concern over control of one’s portrait is taken up in the third chapter in terms of the forensic photograph and the cabinet card. Cook agrees with Tom Gunning that, for Conan Doyle, “the world of the detective and the world of spirits were not [necessarily] incommensurate” (56), since “photography allowed one to see what had not been seen before” (55). While arguably the least compelling of Cook’s chapters—photography in Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) is well-trodden territory—it introduces fascinating material such as Alexandre Dumas’s “horror” (63) of being photographed and his comparison of the mid-nineteenth-century habit of giving photographic portraits “to those who ask for them” with the giving of “alms to a mendicant” (64). In addition to enabling the indiscriminate dissemination of photographs, negative/positive processes corrected the inversion of daguerreotypes; multiple implications of inversion are key to the book. In several nimble readings, Cook charts the impact of the negative’s reversal of light and dark. Chapter 4, for example, takes up what we might think of as an aberrant, albeit often crafted, effect in the form of the double exposure. Cook frames her discussion in terms of the literary double negative, whose “syntactical structure” she claims resembles the combined “negative elements” of the photographic double exposure (74). The chapter ranges widely from short fiction and spirit photography to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as pervaded by a photographic logic of “duplication and...