ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by considering visual culture as comprising things that we look at as well as the techniques employed to catch the eye and hold attention. The nature of this eye, and its prostheses—like the microscope—open up questions of association, memory, subjectivity, and shared culture. Exploring the eye’s variability and limitations, I assess the relationship of the visual to other senses and show how the Victorians understood the physiology and psychology of vision as dependent on one another. Examining the relationship between text and image, especially in illustration, I then move to analyzing the different functions that artists and art works carry within the period’s literature. Finally, I claim that interpretation of a text depends on how one is invited to see—through reference to perception and scale, look and glance, color, line, and texture. Attending to the visual allows one to ask new questions of what one reads.
