Vicarious Pleasures: Photography, Modernity, and Mid-Victorian Domestic Journalism

Family magazines such as the Leisure Hour (1852–1905) and All the Year Round (1859–95) featured articles on the rise of new visual media technologies, linking them to domestic consumption and a rapidly shifting urban environment. In this essay, Charlotte Boman focuses specifically on the stereoscope, which became popular after being introduced to the public at the Great Exhibition (1851). Photography was a frequent topic of discussion in the mid-Victorian periodical press and played a key role in constructing the relationship between middle-class domesticity and the urban environment, demonstrating the ‘reciprocity between graphic and verbal culture and the resulting erosion of the private-public dichotomy’ (p. 216). Because women were so closely associated with privacy and domestic life, urban photography had the effect of unsettling conventional gender relations and destabilising the divide between public and private space.