Victorian Ethical Optics

Abstract

Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated—particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty—the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the ethical optics at the center of this book, as he advocates for “innocence of the eye,” which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within the texts and objects under discussion shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and English genre painters.