The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London, and: The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 (review)

The study's first and second chapters establish a theoretical framework for Beegan's notion of late-Victorian society as distinctly modern, with particular consideration of the diverse periodicals that helped members of the middle class imagine and fashion themselves as part of a "fluid, exciting, and unsettling visual environment" (26). The role of mass visual imagery in the cultivation of personality and public display was encouraged, Beegan argues in this chapter and the next two, through new photorelief technology whereby photography's assumed objectivity was used to encourage self-fashioning and self-identification among members of a middle class primarily defined by pleasure-seeking and consumerism. While consideration of other scholars' recent work on Pater and Lee would have enhanced the depth of Nead's analysis here, she remains consistent to her book's central methodology by treating these writers as parts of a collection of subjects circulating around a particular field of inquiry. [...]the chapter considers the aesthetic works of these writers in combination with paintings and sculptures of Pygmalion, as well as Freud's concept of the uncanny, the Gothic trope of the animated portrait, the magic lantern, the tableau vivant, spiritualism, and automata. Nead turns to Jonathan Crary's well-known Techniques of the Observer to challenge the notion of scopic control and distance and, instead, to demonstrate that late-Victorian cinema was not just an optical experience but also a tactile, bodily one.