Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture

by Amanda Shubert

Overview

A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies—magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics—an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.

The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501783678
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2025
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Table of Contents

Introduction: What Was the Virtual?
1. Magic Panic: The Pedagogy of Disenchantment
2. The Mirror of Ink: Realism, Orientalism, and Vision at a Distance
3. Mountains of Light: The Koh-i-Noor at the Great Exhibition
4. Recalled to Life: Phantasmagoria as the History of the French Revolution
5. Spinning in Place: Trapped in the Moving Picture Machine
Epilogue: Arrival of a Train

What People are Saying About This

John Plotz

Seeing Things crucially asserts the importance of asking not what virtuality is but what it was. Amanda Shubert explores both the reality and the conceptual potential of nineteenth-century visual technologies—and the stories Victorians told themselves of what virtuality was and what it might be.

Rachel Teukolsky

Although 'the virtual' is often seen as a contemporary aesthetic, Seeing Things unearths a vital prehistory in Victorian visual media. The book's lively, unexpected archive opens up a magical world of spinning toys, dissolving views, and trick mirrors—serving not just as entertainment, Amanda Shubert shows us, but also as powerful models for the virtual realms of the novel or the British empire itself. A wonderful, elegant read.