Patricia Smyth
Theatre and Performance Department, University of Warwick
This essay explores theoretical approaches to popular reception, drawing on discussions in the fields of theatre history, art history, and the history of visual technologies. Across a range of popular media, a new form of immersive realism emerged and, with it, a new mode of engagement. I consider critical accounts that frame nineteenth-century spectatorship as a ‘fall from grace’ compared with the rowdy interactive behaviour of audiences of the early part of the century or the traditional practices of folk culture. Recent scholarship that attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ nineteenth-century spectatorship is examined. The essay concludes by suggesting that some of the current discussion about affect may offer a new direction for work that foregrounds the spectators’ share in the creation of meaning.
Introduction
The nineteenth century is seen as a period of rapid industrialisation and urban transformation in which a new kind of commercially-driven popular culture emerged. The public in this period was both larger and more urban than ever before as populations burgeoned and rates of migration to towns and cities increased (Daly 2015). According to the classic view of nineteenth-century metropolitan life, this resulted in the breakdown of traditional communities and social atomisation in a newly deracinated population. How far this was the case across the country remains subject to discussion (Plunkett 2013). However, an account of a visit to London in 1809 by the Swedish historian and poet Erik Gustaf Geijer is particularly evocative. Geijer wrote of feeling ‘lonely among a million human beings’ and continued:
I have never had a more vivid conception of a desert than at the moment when I first found myself in the midst of the most populous city in Europe. I experienced quite vividly the sensation of being a stranger. Among savages the word means the same as enemy. But even that is a human relationship. Here I was mortally insignificant to the whole world, except to my postilion until he got his payment, and to mine host so long as he was waiting for his. Oddly enough, money is only a symbol of commodities of commodities. How much is a human being worth then, when he is a symbol of the symbol? – a shadow of a shadow?
Geijer paints a picture of a city where the traditional bonds of community have been fully eroded and individuals have become mere ciphers of their purchasing power. While the question of how far older allegiances of, say, religion or metier continued to be active remains moot, nineteenth-century audiences had certainly become more socially diverse. As Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow argued in their study of London theatregoing in the latter part of the century, so-called ‘working-class’ theatres catered to an ‘extremely broad social and economic spectrum’, complicating any rigid definition of the ‘popular’ as a distinct realm separate from that of ‘high’ culture (Davis and Emeljanow 2001, 230).
If nineteenth-century audiences were notably more mixed than had previously been the case, the new popular culture itself was also marked by its capacity to move across boundaries and between contexts, whether social, cultural, or national. Developments in transportation meant that successful plays in London were rapidly adapted for the Paris stage, and vice versa. With regard to the visual arts, the sheer number of images that flooded the market in this period has been referred to as a ‘media explosion’ (Farwell 1981, 2). New technologies could produce larger print runs more cheaply than ever before. This enabled the dissemination to wider and more diverse publics not only of original works but also of reproductions of paintings and representations of theatrical staging. Nineteenth-century visual culture is also marked by the circulation of images between different media. A painting exhibited in Paris might appear the following year as a ‘realisation’, meaning a scaled-up, three-dimensional replica using actors in place of painted figures, in an east end of London or transpontine (that is to say the Surrey-side of the River Thames) theatre (Norwood 2009, 140; Smyth 2022, 203).
The enthusiasm of this new public for certain plays, pictures, or news stories often perplexed contemporary commentators, who sought to fathom the seemingly mysterious motivations of crowds, an issue that continues to provoke lively discussion today; indeed, it has been argued that the technological transformation of this period is analogous to the digital revolution of our own time (Crary 1990, 1–2). Understanding the experience of nineteenth-century popular audiences is therefore of key importance; yet research on historical spectators presents a particular set of challenges since the individuals in question rarely left any testimony of their experiences and so direct evidence of contemporary responses to art, theatre, or other types of spectacular entertainment is scarce. Information mainly comes from press reviews; however, critics were not representative of the broader public and their accounts of popular spectatorship are often coloured by their own prejudices.
This essay explores theoretical approaches to popular reception, drawing on discussions in the fields of theatre history, art history, and the history of visual technologies. Approaching the issue from different angles, a common thread may be detected. Across a range of popular media, we see the emergence of a particular form of nineteenth-century immersive realism. This mode presents certain difficulties for scholars since it has no generally recognised name, having never been allocated a style term, such as ‘Realism’ (with a capital ‘R’) or ‘Naturalism’. A recent study of Sensation drama refers to its visual effects as ‘mind-bogglingly real’, which conveys something of the magic and wonder of this aesthetic (Hofer-Robinson and Palmer 2019, xiv). Given the comparison that some scholars have noted between the nineteenth century and the technological developments of our own time, terms drawn from the discussion of new media may be of use. Caroline Radcliffe has argued that the nineteenth-century practice of realisation may be compared to the process of remediation, a term used by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century media to describe the way in which each new technology references, while also claiming to surpass, the previous one (Radcliffe 2012; Bolter and Grusin 1999). Bolter and Grusin’s account is somewhat teleological in that film is argued to remediate photography, while virtual reality remediates film. The nineteenth-century context is different in that a diverse range of technologies co-existed. These included not only painting and theatrical spectacle, but also panoramas (both 360-degree paintings-in-the-round, and moving panoramas), dioramas, stereoscopic photographs, and many more. In Bolter and Grusin’s model, each new medium trumps the reality claim of the previous one, but it is more useful to think of nineteenth-century media as a network, with multiple iterations of a given image serving to validate the authenticity claim of the others.
The facility with which an image could be realised, or remediated, from one format to another worked to intensify the sensation that there was, in fact, no medium at all between the spectator and the image viewed. Bolter and Grusin describe this effect as ‘immediacy’, and this term can be usefully applied to nineteenth-century visual culture that invited the beholder to look ‘through’ signs of mediation and to respond as they would to a direct encounter (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 11). Evidence suggests that popular spectators expressly sought this type of engagement, choosing to overlook the technical aspects particular to a given medium, and responding instead to emotional content (Lübbren 2023; Smyth 2022). The idea of two distinct modes of engagement, each associated with a different social group, is seen in both art and theatre criticism. As David Solkin has shown, the crowds who visited the Royal Academy exhibitions were attracted to story, situation, and character. The tastes of connoisseurs were, in contrast, distinguished from those of the wider public by their ‘ability to treat matters of form as distinctly separate from those of content’ (Solkin 2001, 159). Similarly, Jim Davis has shown how emotional response to theatrical performance became increasingly associated with lower class or provincial audiences as the century progressed (Davis 2017, 530). These spectator positions are, of course, constructions, and contemporary sources do not provide a transparent window on to the experience of individuals; however, it stands to reason that in the context of a newly expanded public, spectators lacking specialist knowledge were more likely to respond to the emotions of a given story or situation since this type of engagement is accessible to anyone. The idea of a purely aesthetic engagement that excludes other types of affective response also originates in this period and arguably stems, at least partly, from the desire of some spectators to distinguish themselves from the ‘crowd’ (Smyth 2022).
The visceral power of spectacular illusion has been seen both then and now as somewhat troubling. As the art historian David Freedberg has argued, the power of certain images to prompt strong emotional responses analogous to those that we might feel if confronted with a given situation in real life is considered ‘too embarrassing, too blatant, too rude, and too uncultured’. Such responses ‘make us aware of our kinship with the unlettered, the coarse, the primitive, the undeveloped’ (Freedberg 1989, i). This view rests on traditional suspicion of idolatry, which runs through nineteenth-century commentaries. As Martin Jay has explored, a dominant strand of twentieth- and twenty-first-century anti-visual thought subsequently built on these traditional attitudes, adding a political dimension (Jay 1994). This approach, in which vision is equated with voyeurism, objectification, and other forms of false knowledge, is exemplified in Guy Debord’s concept of ‘the spectacle’. In Debord’s view, the whole of capitalist society functions according to the logic of commodity fetishism. The multisensory experience of reality is reduced to phantasmagoric images, while the other senses, especially that of touch, are downgraded. Touch has a privileged status in this discussion. If vision is seductive yet unreliable, touch has the potential to expose its illusions. As Jonathan Crary writes, the spectacle involves the ‘unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility’ (Crary 1990, 19).
In nineteenth-century discussions, as now, disdain for the emotional effects of spectacular illusion was manifested in calls for the ‘proper’ boundaries of the arts to be reasserted. As Jane Moody has explored in her account of illegitimate theatrical culture in this period, ‘defenders of “The Drama”’ opposed what they considered to be a ‘theatre of meretricious spectacle’ in favour of the supposedly more rational pleasures of language (Moody 2000, 28). In recent scholarship, arguments against spectacle and for an interactive mode of reception are framed in political terms. As Jay writes, ‘the spectacle’ is the antithesis of festival, since it ‘operates by radically separating individuals, preventing dialogue [and] thwarting unitary class consciousness’ (Jay, 1994, 427). In art historical scholarship, as Freedberg has explored, the emotional power of images is downgraded in favour of a purely aesthetic appreciation of formal qualities, and an aversion to story and narrative as somehow outside the proper concern of visual art. Here, too, the fracturing of illusion is framed as a form of political critique. For example, in his history of nineteenth-century art, Stephen F. Eisenman justifies the focus of the book on canonical modernist examples by stating that ‘formally innovative works’, by which he means those that in one way or another draw attention to the materiality of the medium, ‘may in fact be judged more significant than conservative ones because they played a greater role in bringing about (or, at least, compellingly addressing) historical change’ (Eisenman 1994, 13).
Some recent scholarship has attempted to counter negative evaluations of popular spectacle, for instance, by insisting upon the self-reflexive awareness of popular audiences or on the haptic aspect of a given entertainment, understood to invite a more active form of engagement (Voskuil 2002; Hill 2018). However, in making these arguments, the authors of these studies tacitly accept a view of spectacular entertainment as a conduit of ideology imposed upon a passive public. This essay examines these approaches before proposing a new direction. Drawing on affect theory, I focus on the openness to interpretation of images as a way to consider the spectators’ share in the creation of meaning.
Critical accounts of nineteenth-century spectacular entertainment
One of the clear themes to emerge in critical accounts of nineteenth-century spectacle is the idea that the new commercially-driven popular culture represented a ‘fall from grace’. According to this view, earlier habits of rowdy theatrical spectatorship or the traditional practices of folk culture are presented in utopian terms as allowing for just the kind of active participation that is supposedly no longer possible in modernity. For instance, in his analysis of Hogarth’s Southwark Fair of 1734, Jonathan Crary posits that the painting juxtaposes the tail end of popular ‘carnival’ culture, represented by the lively interactions of the disordered crowd, with the new mode of spectatorship, exemplified in the peep box, a form of itinerant entertainment that invited spectators to view a scene through a small aperture, prominently situated in the foreground (Crary 2002). According to Crary, the presence of this apparatus in Hogarth’s picture signals the advent of a new form of engagement in which the individual becomes an ‘isolated consumer of a mass-produced commodity’ (Crary 2002, 8). As he writes, ‘The prioritization of visuality was accompanied by imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint, particularly for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility’, thus, ‘the multifaceted festival participant is turned into an individualized and self-regulated spectator’ (Crary 2002, 9, 11).
In theatre history, the contrast between the raucous, sociable audiences of the earlier part of the century and the more decorous behaviour of later spectators is seen as an effect of changes to staging such as the development of the proscenium arch and the clear separation of the acting space from the audience. In an article on the scenic designs of Philippe de Loutherbourg, Christopher Baugh argues that this new configuration ‘indicated a clear function for the audience: a neutral, observing passivity, with an invitation to retain an anonymous distance–not to engage physically with the act of performance, for fear of breaking the illusion’ (Baugh 2007, 266). The repositioning of the spectator that Baugh describes here took place across a range of nineteenth-century media. A comparable relationship of beholder to image may be seen in the Diorama, a French invention by the scenic designer and future inventor of the Daguerreotype, L.J.M. Daguerre, which opened in London in 1823, having been successfully introduced in Paris the previous year. The Diorama consisted of a large painting, often depicting Gothic ruins or a landscape, on a transparent medium, approximately 70 by 45 feet, which when lit from above and behind created subtle effects of movement such as the twinkling of stars and the darkening of the sky. The illusion of depth was partly achieved by the novel use of a darkened auditorium, so that the image appeared as a kind of hallucination without any external reference point that might indicate its true nature. The proscenium stage and the Diorama were quite different, then, since theatre auditoria remained illuminated until the late nineteenth century. However, both of these, and, indeed, the peep box, share the common aim of immersion in the illusion, aided by the eradication, so far as possible, of external reference points that might signal the artifice of the spectacle.
Crary refers to ‘self-control’, and this type of approach is indebted to Foucault’s conception of the ‘self-disciplining’ of the modern subject, according to which, instead of punishing the body for infractions, power restructures the self, conditioning individuals through everyday practices to behave as well-functioning units in a capitalist society. Crary and others argue that the focused attention required by the new visual culture worked to discipline the spectator, effectively preparing them for existence in a commodity culture of phantasmagoric images. In his book Suspensions of Perception, Crary cites Richard Wagner’s operas as an example of spectacular culture that compels this type of response, but, as Brian Hand has pointed out, his analysis could equally be applied to popular dramas such as Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, first performed in London in 1861 (Hand 2000). This was the first play to be dubbed a ‘Sensation’ drama, by which it was meant that its success with the public depended on one or more extraordinary ‘sensation scenes’. In the case of The Colleen Bawn, the play’s appeal was thought to have rested on a pivotal sequence, which took place in a moonlit ‘watercave’. The villain, having previously lured the heroine into his boat, was seen to row her to the centre of the dark pool, where he attempted to drown her by pushing her into the water (created using layers of blue gauze). After sinking and rising three times, the heroine was rescued at the last moment by the hero, diving in to save her. This highly suspenseful action would certainly have commanded the kind of focussed attention that Crary identifies as part of the disciplining of the modern subject; however, one objection to such a view is that it denies the agency of spectators, who are imagined as the passive receptors of the ‘top down’ narratives embedded in seductive, yet inauthentic, cultural products.
In the following section, I look at recent approaches that seek to assert a more active role for spectators. I also touch on what is known as the ‘modernity thesis’. This dovetails to some extent with Crary’s arguments about attention and is often invoked in discussions of the high-tension situations of Sensation drama. Spectators are said to have been primed by the ‘stress, and bodily peril’ of the urban environment to crave entertainments that aroused feelings of thrill or anxiety. As Ben Singer writes, ‘the modern individual […] internalized the tempos, shocks, and upheavals of the outside environment, and this generated a taste for hyperkinetic amusements’ (Singer 2001, 62). This has prompted counter-arguments by John Plunkett and others, who oppose the idea of a single model of spectatorship and advocate ‘micro-historical’ approaches which acknowledge regional and cultural differences in the way that modernity was experienced (Plunkett 2013, 5). My own objection is that it defines the spectator’s experience according to a narrow range of extreme affective responses, such as terror and shock, leaving little room for more creative or imaginative engagement.
Restoring agency to popular spectators
Some historians have sought to problematise the ‘passive spectatorship’ model by interrogating the claim that individual subjects became isolated from one another by the conditions of modern spectatorship. They stress instead the ties that bound them together, such as provincial identities, religion, race, and gender (McWilliam 2023). For instance, in an essay on responses to sensation drama, Lynn Voskuil (2002) seeks to complicate the image we may have of enthralled nineteenth-century spectators, each lost in their own private contemplation, arguing for the self-reflexive and communal experience of audiences. Voskuil acknowledges that as theatre audiences became ever larger and more socially diverse, their habits of vociferous opposition naturally waned along with the social cohesion that marked the earlier part of the century. She contends, however, that they were bound together by the shared somatic response to the thrills of Sensation drama. Voskuil maintains, moreover, that the communal experience of racing pulse and increased heart rate was entered into knowingly (Voskuil 2002, 250). This new mode of spectatorship was, she argues, no less political, since it resulted in ‘a kind of affective adhesive that massed them to each other in an inchoate but tenacious nineteenth-century incarnation of the English public sphere’ (Voskuil 2002, 245).
In Voskuil’s account, the audience’s absorption in the stage illusion is periodically fractured by an awareness of artifice and of the other audience members. Although she does not refer to it, the idea that the spectator moves between different states of engagement during the course of a performance derives from nineteenth-century discussions of emotional response. In his Racine et Shakespeare first published in 1822, the French novelist and critic Stendhal argued that the spectators’ pleasure resided in those fractions of a second during which one believed wholeheartedly in the fiction of the performance. In these moments of ‘perfect illusion’, claimed Stendhal, the audience member truly felt the emotions of the drama and it was at such points that they might give vent to their feelings by bursting into tears. However, Stendhal argued that these ‘delicious’ half seconds were incompatible with awareness of the craft of the playwright or the actor: the spectator could not, at the same time, admire the skill of performance and experience wholeheartedly the emotions of the play (Stendhal 1927, 8–9). Stendhal’s objective was to argue for the superiority of Shakespeare over Racine as a model for modern drama, since he claimed that the crucial moments of complete illusion were more frequently experienced when watching plays by the former. For a twenty-first-century commentator such as Voskuil, that kind of engagement is troubling because it suggests the enthralled, ‘passive’ model of spectatorship so problematised in post-Foucauldian discussions. Her solution is to argue that even those moments in which spectators experience reflex somatic responses are underpinned by an underlying deliberation, since absorption in the illusion is part of a collective ritual entered into knowingly (Voskuil 2002, 250).
Voskuil seeks to restore agency to the spectator by asserting their awareness of their own emotional engagement. However, it seems to me that, persuasive as Stendhal’s formulation is, his concept is flawed in the first place since emotional response does not depend on the ‘perfect illusion’ he describes. In the moment of greatest involvement, even the most naïve spectators remain aware, both of the constructed nature of their experience and of their own decision to participate. During moments of high emotion, the spectator may not attend to the other audience members, the conditions of the auditorium, or the craft of the performers, but that is not the same as being in a state of complete belief. If such a state does not, in fact, occur, then there is no need for the elaborate justification offered by Voskuil. Since she takes pains to present absorption as a collective experience, it seems that individuated contemplation remains problematic and is still seen as a distraction from collective action. Social change through dialogue is here tacitly assumed to be the only valid purpose of entertainment, but is there not some value in our capacity to develop a personal and highly individual relationship with a performance or spectacular entertainment? The idea of the nineteenth-century spectator as absorbed in a dream or fantasy is often presented as a form of delusion, but as Jacques Rancière has argued in his seminal essay on theatrical performance ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, it is in such states that each individual refashions the work in their unique manner by bringing to it everything that they ‘read or dreamt, experienced or invented’ (Rancière 2008/2009, 13). This is a form of creativity open to everyone, although its effects political or otherwise are not easy to quantify or evaluate.
Other recent approaches seek to counter the problematic associations of spectacle by stressing the haptic aspect of some nineteenth-century attractions. In an article on the ‘Old London Street’ attraction at the International Health Exhibition in 1884, Kate Hill focusses on the embodied experience of visitors. This feature comprised a large-scale three-dimensional mock-up of a medieval street with houses that people could actually enter, staffed by actors engaged in demonstrations of traditional crafts. Hill considers the visitors’ experience of moving through the irregular, winding layout, entering the narrow spaces of the interiors of houses, and admiring the deftness of the craft demonstrations. She invokes Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘passing by’ or moving through an urban environment as explored in his Practice of Everyday Life, which is presented as a more active form of engagement because ‘created by that encounter, rather than determined in advance’ (Hill 2018, 314; de Certeau 1974/1984). This is contrasted with the experience of viewing a city from an elevated viewpoint, which, for de Certeau, entails the limitations of a purely scopic understanding (de Certeau 1974/1984, 93).
Alice Barnaby’s book on the cultural history of lighting, Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination, 1800–1900, similarly stresses the haptic aspect inherent to technologies such as transparencies and ‘protean views’, small scale images painted on both sides of paper, muslin, or silk supports that could be transformed by the manipulation of light directed from behind. These images were comparable to large-scale Diorama paintings, but were enjoyed at home where the user could employ their own lighting to control the effects. She writes that the ‘relationship between perceiver and object […] was based, not upon passive spectatorship, but active and ongoing interaction with the device’ (Barnaby 2016, 42). Like Hill, Barnaby invokes de Certeau, in this case, his concept of ‘tactical power’, defined as ‘an everyday, covert and transient act […] in contrast to the form of strategic power practised by dominant and enduring social structures’ (Barnaby 2016, 42). Whereas Crary argues that visual technologies trained modern subjects to function within an environment marked by a ‘ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like images’, Barnaby reframes the argument, proposing that devices such as transparencies allowed users to develop strategies for coping with a period characterised by rapid change through processes of experimentation and play (Crary 1990, 21). As she writes, ‘In situations of flux, one must be flexible to thrive’ (Barnaby 2016, 44). The arguments made by Hill and Barnaby are persuasive; however, in both cases agency is considered to rest on manual interaction with the attraction or device in question. Hill’s argument that embodied experience made possible a form of empathetic engagement with the past suggests that, by implication, vision remains associated with objectification and pseudo-knowledge (Hill 2018, 327).
I have outlined some attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ popular spectatorship by insisting upon the audiences’ awareness of the constructed nature of illusion and the involvement of senses other than vision, which, it has been suggested, allowed for a more ‘authentic’ mode of engagement. In these studies, the immersive qualities of popular entertainment and, indeed, vision itself, are still tacitly understood as problematic. John Plunkett’s study of touring moving panoramas in the south-west of England is an exception. The immersive quality of spectacular entertainments has been central to the positioning of the beholder as lost in a private dream-state; Plunkett argues to the contrary that the immediacy of moving panoramas specifically functioned to forge imagined communities, for example, by connecting national events to local concerns. As he writes:
hyperrealism was never simply for-itself […] At a time when there was greater realization of the way far-off events were impinging on individual lives, the resultant sense of insecurity could be partially offset by the familiarity gained by the panoramic experience of “being-there”.
(Plunkett 2013, 25)
A potential objection to Plunkett’s argument is that his focus on a highly specific range of subject matter relating to global current events leaves open the question of why other popular motifs were treated in the same immersive manner. However, his suggestion that modernity involved a sensation of isolation is interesting and may be usefully extended to other types of spectacular attraction. I wonder, for instance, if the popular fascination with history might be framed similarly. It could be argued that, just as modern subjects were more aware than ever of the vast distances separating them from events taking place on the global stage, the past, too, seemed more remote than ever before, prompting a vertiginous yearning to collapse the centuries and millennia separating the present moment from the past.
Plunkett strongly resists a single definition of modern subjectivity, arguing against a ‘specialized mode of perception geared especially to the dynamics of shock and spectacular display’ and insisting that in many regions we see the continuation of ‘more sedate and comforting pleasures’ (Plunkett 2013, 4). He is of course right to highlight the tastes and interests of specific regional audiences; however, although subjects were tailored for particular publics, as far as we know, the realist aesthetic of the provincial shows that he discusses was equally a feature of those presented to metropolitan audiences. Could isolation and a concomitant desire for connection offer an alternative definition of modern subjectivity to that of the ‘modernity thesis’? While Plunkett’s argument about modern subjects’ yearning to establish a connection with world events is persuasive, he does not explain why the powerful illusion of material presence created by entertainments such as the moving panorama should answer that need more than any other form. Could it be that in an ever more complex and alienating modernity, our affective response to our immediate environment has taken on a new status as the touchstone of authenticity? As Didier Maleuvre writes, ‘Realism—the fondness for the world’s reality—rests on an alienated relation to reality’ (Maleuvre, 1999, 182). In other words, the demand for realism does not indicate confidence in the evidence of sensory experience, but, rather, the awareness of its subjective nature. In this view, we yearn to connect not just to distant locations or to the past, but to reality.
New directions in nineteenth-century popular reception
Scholarly accounts that insist upon the haptic, self-reflexive, or communal aspects of popular reception are driven by a perceived need to ‘rescue’ it from the troubling associations of spectacle with irrational emotional responses or with audience passivity. However, if we interrogate the anti-visual assumptions that underlie these attitudes, we may find that the rationale for these strategies is no longer pressing. Some of the discussion around affect may offer a new direction for research that foregrounds the openness of images to interpretation. This goes against the grain of much research into popular culture. We tend to think of popular genres such as anecdotal painting or spectacular melodrama as engaged in broad or simplistic message-making, conveyed through stereotyped characters and stock gestures. This is even the view of Martin Meisel in his ground-breaking account of nineteenth-century popular spectacle, Realizations (Meisel 1983). As Meisel notes, in the case of the visual arts, popular demand was for anecdotal subjects drawn from everyday life, as opposed to the well-known religious and classical themes of history painting. This meant, however, that artists could no longer rely on their audiences’ prior knowledge of the situations portrayed. According to Meisel, they therefore necessarily fell back on a broad semaphore of character and expression. As he argues, the large, non-specialist audience of this period had no place for ‘indigestible anomalies or excessive ambiguity’, welcoming images that were ‘half-expected’. In his view, then, popular visual culture was utterly legible, consisting of ‘comprehensible vocabulary and syntax’ (Meisel 1983, 10). Meisel is essentially sympathetic to the transmedial popular culture that he writes about; however, in this view, popular forms falsify the complexity of experience to produce images that communicate clearly, but only by presenting emotional content that is conventional and stereotyped.
Although coming from a very different position, Meisel’s discussion dovetails with aspects of the ‘modernity thesis’, often invoked in discussions of Sensation drama. Again, the emotions in question are clear-cut, in this case, a very narrow range of feelings that includes suspense, terror, and shock. In both cases, it could be argued that the image in question is understood to operate as a simplified language. This is self-evident in Meisel’s use of terms such as ‘vocabulary’ and ‘syntax’. Sensation drama, too, is often considered as having dealt in stereotyped characters, such as the villain, hero, and innocent victim of Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn. However, the analogy with text operates in another sense here since the feelings of tension, suspense and fear that scholars associate with this genre operate in response to a narrative sequence. What if we take a different approach that, rather than framing popular spectacle as a type of crude text, instead foregrounds the indeterminate quality of images, in other words, their lack of fixedness and openness to interpretation? Recent discussion in the field of affect theory may offer a way forward since it recognises the capacity of images to exceed written explanations and their propensity to escape the intentions of their makers.
Scholars define affect as the raw material of emotion. While emotional categories are acculturated and defined by language, affect theory, in Deirdre Pribram’s paraphrase, ‘emphasizes the movement, indeterminacy, and life potential that exist before signification’ (Pribram 2018, 239). While Pribram and others have warned against the dangers of essentialising posed by affect theory, the assertion that images possess ‘a presence that escapes our linguistic ability to describe or interpret’ is nevertheless persuasive (Moxey 2008, 135). In this framework, the visceral appeal of spectacular illusion always exceeds attempts to contain it within language, and therefore offers the potential for multiple interpretations.
The way in which certain motifs were circulated (or remediated) between different contexts in this period provides evidence in itself of their flexibility. To return to my earlier example, the image of the drowning or drowned woman whose body merges the natural element predates Boucicault’s drama and was subsequently remediated in other plays with quite different narratives (Smyth 2022). What happens if, instead of focusing narrowly on the suspenseful action of the sensation scene, we contemplate the unmooring of this motif from its original context? Such an approach can also draw on activities such as collecting postcards and merchandise, tinselling (decorating prints of actors in role using coloured fabrics and other materials), and grangerising (customising books by adding material such as theatrical ephemera) (Hindson 2015). In all of these practices we see a form of ‘thinking in images’, which allows us to glimpse the creative impulse at the heart of popular spectatorship.
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