THE EXPANSION OF VICTORIAN print culture in the middle of the nineteenth century played a critical role in opening up an imaginative, vicarious engagement with metropolitan spaces and situations. Unfolding through a potent cross-fertilisation of ideas, the periodical press attests to an intense interaction between words and images at mid-century, bespeaking what Gerard Curtis calls a ‘new literary/visual culture, one that was motivated by imperial, educational and mercantile ambitions, and moderated by issues of gender, class and the impact of change’ (2002: 1). In the pages that follow, I explore the visualisation of modernity in mass-produced photographic images and the rich textuality surrounding new media in the second half of the century. I begin by focusing primarily on the photographic communication in periodicals aimed at an ordinary, domestic readership during the 1850s and 1860s. In particular, I trace the discursive patterns coalescing around stereoscopic viewing – the Victorian pictorial activity that perhaps more than any other mid-century viewing practice melds worldly participation and domestic seclusion. In doing so, I emphasise the interconnection of technology with the emulous ideological processes that shaped urban consciousness in the decades predating the handheld camera and dry-plate processes of the 1880s and 1890s, developments that enabled new and decentred modes of image making and consumption (Beegan 2008: 160). The second part of this essay approaches the stereoscope from a different methodological angle by exploring the ways in which popularised stereoviews reproduced or reworked media topics familiar to a predominantly urbanised (or suburbanised) middle-class readership. Taking as its subject a relatively unexplored aspect of Victorian print culture, this essay seeks to throw light on the ideological work performed by the photographic economy, focusing specifically on the stereoscope and its role in the construction of women as modern subjects.

I do not perceive the stereoscope as primarily defined by its association with familial isolation, that is, as a technology that works to amplify the separation of the domestic sphere from public and communal spaces. Rather, I suggest that middle-class enthusiasm for entering into the virtual reality offered by stereoscopic imagery, along with the critique that accompanied its popularisation, highlights the ambivalent relationship between mid-Victorian domesticity and modernity.