VLC_46_3-4_BookReviews 759..763 during the Victorian period. Based on our current preoccupation with defining what we mean when we talk about Victorian materiality through “thing theory” and other object-based methodologies, this labor continues to haunt us today. NOTES 1. Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 1. 2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. 3. Verax [J. J. G. Wilkinson], “Evenings with Mr. Home and the Spirits,” Spiritual Herald (February 1856): 5. 4. J[ames]Burns, “The Work of the Spiritualist, and How to Do It?” Medium and Daybreak, November 17, 1876, 722–23. 5. Rev. W. Mountford, “Thoughts on Spiritualism,” Spiritual Magazine (November 1869): 481–82. 6. M. A. Oxon [William Stainton Moses], “After All, Is There Any Such Thing as Matter?” Human Nature (May 1877): 194. 7. Oxon, “After All,” 194. 8. Epes Sargent, The Proof Palpable of Immortality, 2nd ed. (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1881), 21. 9. “How Do Spirits Make Themselves Visible?” Spiritual Magazine (June 1872): 256. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 311. Media ALISON BYERLY 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. MATERIALITY, MEDIA 759 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 https://www.cambridge.org/core 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 cen- tury, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron created photographs to illus- trate Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings, among other literary works. These artworks aligned representation with reproduction by disseminat- ing 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 influ- enced by visual art and vice versa. Theatrical renderings of famous paint- ings 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.1 A piv- otal scene in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda adds another layer of media- tion by offering a literary depiction of an amateur actress posing as a painting.2 Nineteenth-century “program music” sought to create narra- tives 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 advertise- ment. As Ann McClintock, Thomas Richard, and Jennifer Wicke have shown, the influence of advertising media on literature and society was far-reaching.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 rem- iniscence 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.4 Panoramas were often accompa- nied by lectures, performances, guidebooks, maps, and other ancillary 760 VLC • VOL. 46, NO. 3/4 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 https://www.cambridge.org/core 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 con- temporary 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 cine- matic 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, type- writers, and stenographic machines are crucial to generating the texts that form the basis of the novel.5 A number of Victorian scholars have compared Victorian communication networks, such as the telegraph and the postal service, to contemporary communication systems.6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin popularized the term “remedi- ation” to describe the tendency of new media to reconceptualize and refashion old media forms.7 New media, they claimed, do not kill off their antecedents but rather absorb them into new modes of representa- tion. 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 strat- egies of the midcentury panorama display. These transitions are consis- tent 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.”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 trans- lates it from the nineteenth century to the present. Holmes’ frequent telegrams become texts, and Sherlock’s laptop computer serves as a MEDIA 761 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 https://www.cambridge.org/core visual metaphor for his encyclopedic brain. There have also been a num- ber 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 reflex- ivity, 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. NOTES 1. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). 3. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Thomas Richard, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851 to 1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertising, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 4. Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 5. Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 621–45. 6. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Catherine Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’ Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 762 VLC • VOL. 46, NO. 3/4 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 https://www.cambridge.org/core 7. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 8. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), x. Medicine MARY WILSON CARPENTER STEVEN Shapin has observed that although we live in a scientific cul-ture, most of this culture’s inhabitants have little idea of what scien- tists do and know.1 By contrast, not only do we live in a medicalized culture, but as Charles E. Rosenberg comments, “for most of us today, physicians and lay persons alike, medicine is what doctors do and what doctors believe (and what they prescribe for the rest of us).”2 Most of us today have direct, personal knowledge of what doctors do and know. This major cultural difference between “science” and “medicine” emerged in the nineteenth century when medical practice became part of everyday life. Science inhabited a much more elite sphere. Victorians read about science and scientists, but they did not have a fam- ily scientist who practiced science on them. They did have family doctors or, if they were poor, Poor Law doctors. The Victorian poor were also likely to experience hospital medicine, as more and more voluntary hos- pitals, supported by donations and open to the poor, were founded. By the last quarter of the century, more and more middle- and upper-class patients were also entering hospitals as private patients. It was in the nineteenth century that a medical profession first emerged as such. In the early part of the century, medicine and surgery were practiced by a conglomerate bunch of apothecaries, apprentice- trained surgeons who might or might not have had any formal instruc- tion in surgery or experience in hospitals, and Oxbridge physicians who were erudite in Greek and Latin medicine but might never have treated a live patient until they went into practice. By the end of the nineteenth century, legislation had imposed standards requiring univer- sity medical education and hospital training, and efforts—largely unsuc- cessful—were made to define and exclude “quacks.” MEDIA, MEDICINE 763 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000761 https://www.cambridge.org/core Outline placeholder Notes Media Notes Medicine