Victorians Living in Public: Cartes de Visite as 19th-Century Social Media

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This essay examines how the carte de visite functioned as a form of “social media” avant la lettre. The carte de visite, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1860s, was a mobile, public, and performative media form which gained meaning through its circulation. In examining these attributes of the carte’s social significance, this essay contends that the carte possessed many of the attributes that are popularly associated with digital photography in the early twenty-first century, and that, in this Victorian media form, we can see a precursor to the image sharing that prevails in the age of social networking.