Although the term “media” postdates the Victorian period, Victorian culture was suffused with media. In fact, mediation, broadly defined, was a defining aesthetic of the period, and one could argue that the field of media studies properly begins with the nineteenth century.
Many Victorian art forms sought to expand the boundaries of their medium by incorporating other media. In the world of visual art, pre-Raphaelite painters created pictures based on poems, or, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote poems to accompany paintings. Later in the century, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron created photographs to illustrate Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the Kings, among other literary works. These artworks aligned representation with reproduction by disseminating the original work far beyond its original instantiation, a popularizing move that anticipated later technologies of transmission.
As Martin Meisel demonstrated in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, theater was profoundly influenced by visual art and vice versa. Theatrical renderings of famous paintings led to an in-home version of this form of mediation, tableaux vivants, a kind of parlor game in which guests posed as famous paintings.Footnote 1 A pivotal scene in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda adds another layer of mediation by offering a literary depiction of an amateur actress posing as a painting.Footnote 2 Nineteenth-century “program music” sought to create narratives or evoke scenes, as in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) or Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897).
Commercial media also blossomed during this period. The reduced cost and improved quality of printing led to a boom in mass distribution of paper advertising products, such as leaflets, brochures, and pamphlets, as well as paper novelties, like paper dolls, cardboard toy theaters, fold-out panoramas, greeting cards, and cartes de visite featuring photographic portraits. Trade cards, which first came into use in the eighteenth century, became more lavishly illustrated forms of advertisement. As Ann McClintock, Thomas Richard, and Jennifer Wicke have shown, the influence of advertising media on literature and society was far-reaching.Footnote 3
The Victorians also invented entirely new forms of mass media, such as the panorama or diorama, an entertainment staple of the period. Enormous 360-degree paintings filled large venues with painstakingly detailed renderings of scenes depicting great cities, such as London, Paris, Rome, or Constantinople; great battles; or even actual journeys, through what became known as “moving panoramas” that recreated a trip down the Rhine or Mississippi. Often, a narrator would offer a reminiscence or commentary that enhanced the documentary value of the representation. Other theatrical trappings sought to create a “you are there” sense of immersion in the scene.Footnote 4 Panoramas were often accompanied by lectures, performances, guidebooks, maps, and other ancillary productions, making them one of the earliest instances of multiplatform entertainment.
I have argued that many forms of Victorian textual representation should also be considered media, and that the confluence and overlap among these forms gives literature a place within the trajectory of media development that leads from panoramas, through cinema, to contemporary virtual reality and similarly immersive media experiences. All of these forms show an evolution towards increasing realism and sense of presence. The major strategies of nineteenth-century fiction strive for these same qualities. The ingratiating stance of the narrator, the cinematic rendering of landscape, and, above all, the self-reflexivity of Victorian fiction contribute to a sense of immersion in the text that is analogous to many of the strategies performed by other media.
Victorian fiction reflects the great interest in emerging technologies of communication. Telegraphy plays a prominent role in works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Bram Stoker, and others. As Stephen Arata noted in his seminal article on Dracula, telegrams, typewriters, and stenographic machines are crucial to generating the texts that form the basis of the novel.Footnote 5 A number of Victorian scholars have compared Victorian communication networks, such as the telegraph and the postal service, to contemporary communication systems.Footnote 6
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin popularized the term “remediation” to describe the tendency of new media to reconceptualize and refashion old media forms.Footnote 7 New media, they claimed, do not kill off their antecedents but rather absorb them into new modes of representation. We see this process at work in the Victorian period and beyond, in the way that photographs mimic the qualities of visual and theatrical art, while turn of the century cinema continues to employ many of the strategies of the midcentury panorama display. These transitions are consistent with the kind of evolution described by Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, who see media change as an “accretive, gradual process … in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.”Footnote 8
The Victorian obsession with media may account for the twenty-first century obsession with re-presenting Victorian texts and themes in the most contemporary media. In addition to a continuing stream of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens film adaptations, there is the wildly popular BBC Sherlock, which takes media technology as a central theme and translates it from the nineteenth century to the present. Holmes’ frequent telegrams become texts, and Sherlock's laptop computer serves as a visual metaphor for his encyclopedic brain. There have also been a number of Victorian video games, including Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (Focus Home Interactive, 2014), Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun (Paradox Interactive, 2003), and Victoria II (Paradox, 2010). And, of course, the growing field of digital scholarship related to the Victorian period is a further testament to the forward compatibility of Victorian art.
The field of Victorian studies has always recognized the dynamic interconnections among different forms of art and culture in the period. Treating these forms of representation as “media” highlights their reflexivity, broad dissemination, and focus on engaging audiences, and it underscores the degree to which they foreshadow the evolution of many contemporary technologies of communication and representation.
