Books by Jonathan Potter
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, 2018
This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual ... more This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual experience. It argues that new visual technologies gave expression to new ways of seeing, using these to uncover the visual discourses that facilitated, informed and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. In doing so, the book reconsiders literary and non-fiction works by well-known authors including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, G.H. Lewes, Max Nordau, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Conrad, as well as shedding light on less-known works drawn from the periodical press. By revealing the discourses that formed around visual technologies, the book challenges and builds upon existing scholarship to provide a powerful new model by which to understand how the Victorians experienced, conceptualised, and wrote about vision.
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Journal Articles by Jonathan Potter
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2018
'Keyword' essay for special double issue of Victorian Literature and Culture.
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Journal of Victorian Culture, 2016
The stereoscope was a popular parlour toy that provided a powerful psychological viewing experien... more The stereoscope was a popular parlour toy that provided a powerful psychological viewing experience in the heart of the domestic space. In this article, I consider the stereoscope’s position as an instrument that was experienced, and often represented, in relation to the imaginative narrative processes of memory and fantasy. By reading the stereoscope’s position within popular fiction, the article seeks to uncover the way in which the stereoscope was consumed. The article shows that for many in the mid-Victorian period, the stereoscope operated as an everyday narrative-forming experience with a strong relation to the popular periodical fiction that was read alongside it in the domestic space. The first section of this article considers the cultural and psychological position of the stereoscope within the home, reading this alongside a number of short stories published in the popular periodic press. The second section consists of an analysis of the stereoscope’s involvement with psychological dualism and self-doubling, issues which stem, in particular, from the device’s reliance on photography. These aspects of the device are explored in relation to a nineteenth-century short story which draws a problematic relation between one’s self and one’s portrait. Finally, the article draws these issues together to show the importance of imaginative narratives within the stereoscopic experience. The viewing conditions of the stereoscope encouraged viewers to engage in an anticipatory, open-ended, and imaginative fantasy narrative. It is this unique narrative character of stereoscopic viewing experiences which most prominently distinguishes the device from other visual media.
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Conference Papers by Jonathan Potter
A short story from mid-summer 1884, published in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, bu... more A short story from mid-summer 1884, published in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, builds a narrative around the surprise find of a fragment of a lantern slide which had been buried in the flower bed. Startled by his uncle’s reaction to the fragment, the first-person narrator asks: ‘Is there any history attached to it that you look at it so strangely?’ The found fragment, the strange look, and the query, then prompt a story drawn from the uncle’s memory. The story ends ambiguously with the reader left unsure whether the uncle’s tale really was a recounted memory or whether it was a fantasy, or a little of both. This kind of structure, in which a glimpse of something unexpected leads to an explicitly subjective narrative – usually a memory or fantasy - is a common trope within the short fiction of the nineteenth-century periodical press. Elsewhere, for example, we find men fantasising about women’s photographs glimpsed in shop windows or daydreaming about scenes seen through stereoscopes, and fiction machines developing stories like photographs directly from people’s brains. These short stories all share a preoccupation with individual interpretations of visual fragments that probe at the bounds between reality, memory, and fantasy. Mere glimpses are seemingly turned into ordered narratives, but ultimately readers are left with their own ambiguous fragments to interpret. This paper, then, explores the value of the short story form in experimenting with ambiguity and subjectivity, raising questions about gender, psychology, and narrative certainty.
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The stereoscope, a device that allowed the viewer to see flat photographic images with the exciti... more The stereoscope, a device that allowed the viewer to see flat photographic images with the exciting new element of depth, was a sensationally popular optical toy in the mid-Victorian period. Originally conceived as a way to demonstrate philosophical and scientific principles, it quickly became a versatile entertainment device within the home, able to give convincing views of an almost infinite range of subjects from cities and landscapes, to humorous and even pornographic scenes. This paper will use a story from a Victorian women’s magazine, about a woman who views a stereograph of her lover, to illustrate some of the ways in which the stereoscope was positioned, both as a philosophical instrument and as a device for domestic entertainment. In this way, the paper will examine the stereoscope as a point of intersection between scientific ideas about vision and optics, domesticity, and popular fiction.
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In 1852 Henry Mayhew, accompanied by the famous aeronaut Charles Green, ascended over London in a... more In 1852 Henry Mayhew, accompanied by the famous aeronaut Charles Green, ascended over London in a balloon. The effect was profound and Mayhew described the journey as one in which you felt ‘as you had ideally in your dreams’.
Dreams, positioned in popular nineteenth-century understanding somewhere between the states of sleep and wakefulness, were a site of vision in their own right. In 1858, for example, Edmund Dixon wrote in Household Words:
'One of the most curious and pleasing delusions to which the soul of man is in the habit of yielding itself during repose, is the frequent dream in which the sleeping individual fancies himself gifted with the power of flight. He is uplifted from the ground, as if in a buoyant medium, and glides without an effort through the scenes of an ever-varying panorama.'
The dream’s-eye view is in this instance reminiscent of the balloon flight, which Mayhew describes in terms of a dream. The two forms of vision refer back to each other. It is this link between the visual experiences of flights imagined and actual that this paper will explore, drawing on the myth-making surrounding balloon flights and the different optical technologies with which were associated.
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On 10th August 1861, a week after Great Expectations concluded, a new novel began in Dickens’ jou... more On 10th August 1861, a week after Great Expectations concluded, a new novel began in Dickens’ journal All the Year Round. This novel, A Strange Story, by one of the most popular writers of the time, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, was well read and partly inspired, in December 1862, John Pepper’s famous ghost illusion show at the Royal Polytechnic. The story is striking in its breadth of reference to other writers and thinkers as it forms, amidst a plot concerning the supernatural, detailed discussions of the nature of knowledge, consciousness, and the supernatural. Bulwer, indeed, considered the novel one of his ‘highest and deepest’ works, and agonized over whether his general readership would understand his philosophical ideas. Yet by engaging in questions about epistemology and the tensions between materialism and spiritualism, Bulwer generates a level of discussion that is unusual in the context of Dickens’ journal. This paper examines how A Strange Story acted to disseminate to a general audience some of the debates and ideas that were prevalent in scientific discourse at the time.
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Reviews by Jonathan Potter
The British Society for Literature and Science, 2018
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The British Society for Literature and Science, 2018
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The British Society for Literature and Science, 2017
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Journal of Literature and Science, 2015
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Online Publications by Jonathan Potter
The Conversation, Sep 18, 2018
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Journal of History of Ideas Blog, Aug 29, 2018
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Journal of Victorian Culture Online, Sep 27, 2016
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Journal of Victorian Culture Online, Apr 7, 2015
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University of Leicester Victorian Studies Centre Blog, Dec 9, 2013
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The Victorian Web, Dec 14, 2010
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Books by Jonathan Potter
Journal Articles by Jonathan Potter
Conference Papers by Jonathan Potter
Dreams, positioned in popular nineteenth-century understanding somewhere between the states of sleep and wakefulness, were a site of vision in their own right. In 1858, for example, Edmund Dixon wrote in Household Words:
'One of the most curious and pleasing delusions to which the soul of man is in the habit of yielding itself during repose, is the frequent dream in which the sleeping individual fancies himself gifted with the power of flight. He is uplifted from the ground, as if in a buoyant medium, and glides without an effort through the scenes of an ever-varying panorama.'
The dream’s-eye view is in this instance reminiscent of the balloon flight, which Mayhew describes in terms of a dream. The two forms of vision refer back to each other. It is this link between the visual experiences of flights imagined and actual that this paper will explore, drawing on the myth-making surrounding balloon flights and the different optical technologies with which were associated.
Reviews by Jonathan Potter
Online Publications by Jonathan Potter
Dreams, positioned in popular nineteenth-century understanding somewhere between the states of sleep and wakefulness, were a site of vision in their own right. In 1858, for example, Edmund Dixon wrote in Household Words:
'One of the most curious and pleasing delusions to which the soul of man is in the habit of yielding itself during repose, is the frequent dream in which the sleeping individual fancies himself gifted with the power of flight. He is uplifted from the ground, as if in a buoyant medium, and glides without an effort through the scenes of an ever-varying panorama.'
The dream’s-eye view is in this instance reminiscent of the balloon flight, which Mayhew describes in terms of a dream. The two forms of vision refer back to each other. It is this link between the visual experiences of flights imagined and actual that this paper will explore, drawing on the myth-making surrounding balloon flights and the different optical technologies with which were associated.