Dickens Quarterly

Victorian Negatives opens with an anecdote: in 1856, Charles Dickens declined John J. E. Mayall's request to sit for a daguerreotype. Dickens, as we know, was the subject of a great many photographic portraits; however, in this instance, he refused due to a "disinclination to multiply" his "counterfeit presentments" (xv). Susan E. Cook uses this incident, and Dickens's explanation, to introduce her book's key concerns about the wider anxieties that emerged with negative-based photography in the nineteenth century. The daguerreotype was non-reproducible, but Dickens's cited reasons for refusal, the potential for multiplication and distortion, were central to recent photographic developments using negatives. Cook's wide-ranging and yet detailed study examines these issues through the technical and figurative manifestations of such negative-based processes. In so doing, Cook shows how the metaphoric associations of specific photographic techniques came to be culturally embedded, expressed directly and indirectly through literary works of the period, especially in relation to questions of individuality and celebrity.

Cook, therefore, is not only concerned with iterative examples of photography; she demonstrates the pervasive ways in which negative technology permeated the literary imagination, and she explores how this imagination shaped literary genres and texts from realist and historical fiction to detective stories and gothic novels. Negative-based techniques inverted light and dark on a glass plate and then used this inversion in different ways to produce a potentially endless number of positive images. By focusing on a particular technical development, Cook shows photography to be a series of processes rather than a singular invention; and she argues that it was this specific advancement, rather than photography more generally, that "played an instrumental role in the representation of Victorian photography in literary culture" (xxi). The negative, in its various forms, challenged objective truth claims and traditional metaphoric associations of light and dark. In this way, Cook extends previous studies that read photography alongside realism and representation (see Armstrong; Novak).

Chapter 1 introduces Dickens's literary persona and his ambivalent relationship to photography. Cook notes that he was photographed at least 120 times, and he certainly saw the value of those portraits for his authorial image; yet Dickens also expressed an aversion to the process and the result. Dickens wanted to be well-known but not over-exposed. This tension was aggravated by the development of negative technologies and, Cook argues, it seeped into his fiction. She suggests that A Tale of Two Cities articulates [End Page 401] a preference for control over the image, a resistance to the multiplication of that image, and an interest in the duality of past and present. In these ways, Cook claims, the novel harks back to a photographic sensibility that is distinctly Daguerrean.

Cook continues her discussion of Dickens in Chapter 2. Here the focus is Little Dorrit and the experimental process of solarization, a technique that brings together positive and negative in a single image through overexposure to unfiltered light. As such, solarized images are distorted representations of reality and can undermine traditional associations between truth and light in ways that resonate with Dickens's use of light and dark. Cook explains that, "The world of this novel is one where light does not illuminate truth but blinds, where the limit between light and dark is not always distinct, and where what is seen is sometimes unreal" (45).

The relationship between representation, authority, and truth remains central to Chapter 3's analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and the seemingly contradictory modes of forensic and spirit photography. Curiously, given Doyle's interest in vision, objectivity, and photography, there are few mentions of photographic technology in his detective stories. One notable exception is "A Scandal in Bohemia," which challenges photographic objectivity through, once again, anxieties of reproduction and inversion. In the story, Holmes's erroneous reliance on the authority...