John O. Jordan

This anthology of critical essays is ranged around different aspects of the visual in the Victorian era, especially as regards literature: optical technologies, illustrations in novels, urban photography, portraiture of Queen Victoria, visuality in poetry, and so on. Like a lot of critical anthologies, I don't think it really coheres: you have essays on a wide range of very specific topics, making it hard to draw connections between them or see any kind of interesting conversation emerging. show more Like, an essay on John Millais's paintings of children is so specific to Millais that it become impossible to draw any kind of general inference or idea about the visual imagination from it, and thus it's very difficult to link it to a similarly specific article about the role of spectacle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Most of the writers aren't drawing outward connections, so why should you? The editors try to draw things together in the introduction, of course, but though what they say about the subjective/objective paradigm is interesting, it's very implicit in the actual essays.

There can still be the occasional worthy part, even if the whole isn't up to much. I enjoyed Susan R. Horton's "Were They Having Fun Yet?: Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves," which looked at various aspects of the Victorian obsession with looking at looking and watching their watching; Jennifer M. Green's "'The Right Thing in the Right Place': P. H. Emerson and the Picturesque Photograph," a fascinating discussion of how the photographer Peter Henry Emerson hired models to create his images of peasant life because the models were better at looking like peasants than actual peasants; Ronald R. Thomas's examination of the emergence of the detective in fiction in "Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction"; and Margaret Homans's "Victoria's Sovereign Obedience: Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother," which shows how the appearance of limited political power expanded the Queen's symbolic power for the nation. show less

A mixed bag

I've read all of Dickens' novels and take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of them, but I found this Cambridge Companion less than completely satisfying. Several of the authors did a very good job of covering their assigned topics, but several others narrowed their focus too much and seemed to be straining too hard to say something original (e.g., uncovering obscure parallels between this Dickens novel and that Shakespearean play). In academia, being original is highly show more prized, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that this collection of essays turned out the way it did.

With roughly ten thousand pages available to draw upon, it seems like there's plenty to be said about Dickens' novels--commentary that would enrich the Dickens reader's experience--without becoming overly cute.

I don't mean to be unreasonably harsh. This book deserves all four stars I gave it. Still, I was hoping for something a little bit different. show less