Surveying work on Victorian visual culture for this journal twenty years ago, Kevin Z. Moore suggested: “there was no coherent politics of vision in the nineteenth century; there was only an explosion of visual devices and their uses by whoever had the wherewithal to put them to use.”Footnote ¹ By 1997, it seemed to Moore that research had moved from previous, more abstract (and literary) considerations of “poetics” to more solid historical ground: “telescoping terms or microscopic visions once understood idealistically and poetically are now understood empirically, historically, and cognitively.” But this shift also disrupted the relations between historical subjects so that in reviewing the literature it appeared that there was no coherency at all, only an atomized “explosion” of individual objects within singular contexts. Twenty years later, Moore's comment remains apt since these many readings (upon which we can now add many more), do not offer much coherency; they remain divergent, fugitive, and often contradictory across different contexts. Whereas in science one might ask if a study's results are generalizable, we seem to have acquired a distaste for generalizing our findings.

It is also clear that the development of our theoretical understanding has not kept pace with our historical and literary work. It is still routine, for example, to expect works on Victorian visuality to refer to Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (1990).Footnote ² While this is influential and fine scholarship, is the implication really that, nearly thirty years later, there have been no significant refinements and developments to this last great theorization of nineteenth-century visuality? Few generalizable theories or narratives have emerged in recent years through which we might compose our detailed historical knowledge into a broader understanding of Victorian visuality. There is obviously value in the pantheon of paradigmatic figures from last-century's groundbreaking work (principally the flâneur and the panopticon, in addition to Crary's work on subjective and embodied vision) but equally obviously, they do not apply to all circumstances or help explain all phenomena. We have, thankfully, moved away from such theoretical contortions that might, for instance, conclude that “the magic lantern was magic because it was a panoptic machine for enforcing the status quo,”Footnote ³ or which felt compelled to theorize static panoramas as either analogous or antithetical to the panopticon (as many otherwise-brilliant works on the subject have). But in moving away from these rather forced theoretical readings, we have not found equivalent useful replacements. This is not to say there has been no theoretical work, only that it has tended to stand alone and, either implicitly or explicitly, resisted broader applications.

It is with some irony that I write this for Victorian Literature and Culture, given that a related and recent debate in Victorian studies has revolved around the perceived dominance of literary studies over other disciplinary approaches. Certainly, studies of visuality might be charged with being overly literary at times, which is precisely what Peter K. Andersson has pointed out, while making a larger case for expanding our collective assumptions and approaches—the examples he draws on, intriguingly, are primarily photographic.Footnote ⁴ Whereas Moore considered that in 1997 visuality studies had evolved away from literary optics, Andersson suggests that this evolution has not yet gone far enough, that our assumptions and methods are, as it were, stuck in a rut. There seems, to me at least, a need not to move away from literary studies to historical studies (or vice versa which is what one might take the V21 Collective to have broadly suggested), but a development of a more fully interdisciplinary framework with which to situate our cultural and historical work. This is not a new notion: in 2004 Margaret Cohen and Anne Higonnet made a cogent call for “studies of the shared edges between textuality and visuality, and even more so between modes of visuality.”Footnote ⁵

In this respect there is a new trend gradually coming into view which is a movement towards using intertextual connections to link visual experiences as discourses. This makes sense since, while we have many visual artefacts from the Victorian period to gaze upon (although not always quite so many as we might wish), it is primarily through Victorian texts that we understand what the Victorians saw (and how and why) when they gazed upon those artefacts. If the bulk of our knowledge of Victorian visualities comes through visual experience articulated via text, then it stands to reason that we might attempt to reconstruct the interrelations between these experiences by mapping textual relations. That said, Andersson is right to point to a general overreliance on certain kinds of sources (“Unless Victorian scholars do some soul-searching concerning their reliance on metropolitan, elitist, and, not least, exclusively British sources, this discipline will keep presenting a biased picture of a historical period.”).Footnote ⁶

In hindsight this approach can be recognized as long ago as 1995 when Terry Castle showed us the value of thinking about visualities as textually mediated cultural discourses in her work on the phantasmagoria.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, three of the key works of the 2000s adopted a similar approach: Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2008), Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria (2006), and Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) all offer invaluable readings of cross-media cultural discourses.Footnote ⁸ This has been more explicitly theorized in recent work: Erkki Huhtamo's explication of “discursive panoramas,” for example, provides a model for how visual technologies, media, and experiences might be organized into discourses.Footnote ⁹ Shelly Jarenski, in particular, has expanded on this in Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893 (2015), as has, to a lesser extent, Marit Grøtta in Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (2015).Footnote ¹⁰ It is probably too early to tell if this will become a major shift in scholarship on visuality but it has the potential to address some of the theoretical challenges thrown up by our existing body of research.

One of the great virtues of conceptualizing Victorian visuality as a pluralism of discourses is that not only might these fluctuate and shift from one context to another (in the way that a shared metaphor shifts across texts) but there remains space for individual agency. Indeed, individuals might move between, combine, or alter discourses as they see fit. These discourses do not deny the plurality of the “explosion of visual devices and their uses,” as Moore put it, but they do make room for a pluralistic and multifaceted narrative that, in overlapping itself, might even be composed into a set of coherent theorizations that can be meaningfully applied across contexts.