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Seeing Things
Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture
Amanda Shubert (Author)
9781501783678
Hardback, published 15 November 2025
252 pages, 7 b&w halftones, 16 color halftones - 7 Halftones, black and white - 16 Halftones, color
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.907 kg
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.
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