Publisher Description

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision.
The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.

Author Biography

Peter John Brownlee is Curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Table of Contents

Introduction. An Ocular Age: Vision in a World of Surfaces
PART I. THE PROBLEM OF VISION
Chapter 1. Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in Vision
Chapter 2. Vision, Eyewear, and the Art of Refraction
PART II. THE CHAOS OF PRINT
Chapter 3. Broadsides, Display Types, and the Physiology of the Moving Eye
Chapter 4. Signboards, Vision, and Commerce in the Antebellum City
PART III. PAINTING, PRINT, PERCEPTION
Chapter 5. The Optics of Newspaper Vision
Chapter 6. Paper Money, Spectral Illusions, and the Limits of Vision
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Review

"[Brownlee's] ostensible quarry is an antebellum visual culture that developed around the intersecting concerns of ophthalmology and optometry, reform physiology, and a rapidly expanding market economy, but he sees vision as more than the mere sum of its parts. Brownlee's analysis reaches beyond the usual metaphors of nineteenth-century vision as possessing, knowing, or controlling, analyzing the 'economy of the eyes' as a shifting field that is at once physiological, commercial, political, and cultural, and almost always attended by doubt and ambiguity...The Commerce of Vision matches the undeniable richness and complexity of antebellum America's ocularity with deft, close readings that will bear repeated examination." * Panorama *
"Brownlee has identified an important and rich topic, one that opens up other avenues for scholars to explore. In addition, his interdisciplinary approach provides an excellent model of how to bridge cultural and scientific history and understand vision at both a conceptual and physiological level. The Commerce of Vision is at once a major contribution to the history of visual culture in antebellum America and a call for continued work on this history, especially given its continuing relevance to our own digitally saturated world." * Literature & History *
"[A]n elegantly written and extremely interesting study of a range of visual artefacts, including newspapers, paintings, photographs, caricatures, eye glasses, paper money and signboards, among others. Brownlee effectively weaves together a number of thematic threads to create a cohesive investigation of how people in antebellum America looked, learned to look differently and dealt with failures related to vision, both physiological and ideological." * Social History of Medicine *
"The Commerce of Vision is an original, rich, and engaging study of an antebellum culture intrigued by questions of seeing and visual representation yet unsettled by the energies of rapidly expanding urban and market economies. Ranging over visual, material, and archival evidence-from paintings and daguerreotypes to broadsides, typeface, and newspapers, from ophthalmology and eyeglasses to paper currency and signboards-it will interest readers in visual and material culture studies, American studies, and the history of science." * Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware *

Promotional

In The Commerce of Vision, Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Long Description

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision. The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.

Review Quote

" The Commerce of Vision is an original, rich, and engaging study of an antebellum culture intrigued by questions of seeing and visual representation yet unsettled by the energies of rapidly expanding urban and market economies. Ranging over visual, material, and archival evidence--from paintings and daguerreotypes to broadsides, typeface, and newspapers, from ophthalmology and eyeglasses to paper currency and signboards--it will interest readers in visual and material culture studies, American studies, and the history of science."--Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware

Promotional "Headline"

In The Commerce of Vision , Peter John Brownlee integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Excerpt from Book

Introduction An Ocular Age: Vision in a World of Surfaces In a journal entry dated May 14, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Harder times. Two days since, the suspension of specie payments by the New York and Boston banks." Emerson, like many of his generation, was attuned to one of the most pressing financial issues of the day. The chain of events leading to the suspension of specie payments that Emerson lamented was initiated by President Andrew Jackson''s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States in the mid-1830s. As he departed office, Jackson vetoed the bank''s recharter and issued the Specie Circular, a primary engine for westward expansion, which required purchases of government land be made in gold or silver, not in paper banknotes. As a result of President Andrew Jackson''s scorn for the Second Bank, which served as a fiscal agent for the government, its charter had been allowed to expire in 1836. Amid the financial and cultural catastrophes of the Panic of 1837, Emerson''s entry went on to praise sleep as the only palliative against the ills and ailments of the day. But the nation was now "wide awake" as it faced the prospect of further deregulation of banking in an era of western expansion and national development. Banknotes, which fluctuated wildly in value, underscored the watchfulness, the vigilance necessary to keep oneself solvent and self-sufficient. These worn pieces of paper circulated widely, emblematizing the exchange, and corresponding perception, of printed information and its continually fluctuating value that had come to define the era''s cultural optics . Below the entry, Emerson scratched the elliptic but prophetic phrase "Our Age is Ocular" (Figure 1). The inscription is as vague and inscrutable as it is provocative. That he pairs it with the Panic of 1837 and the paper money economics of the period is one of the key subjects of this book. Well before the collapse of the Second Bank of the United States, paper had become a central medium of exchange in antebellum America, circulating in the form of banknotes, handbills, broadsides, and newspapers. These cultural forms and the practices they facilitated were part of a broader set of developments that historians have hailed as "revolutions" in transportation, communication, and the capitalist marketplace. Such changes altered the fabric of daily life during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. New forms of production and distribution fashioned new modes of consumption, as more Americans, urban and rural, were drawn into the market economy''s system of wage labor and increasingly mechanized forms of commodity production. A growing infrastructure for transportation--manifested in the expansion of the nation''s network of roads and canals and in the development of steam-powered railroads and boats--enlarged the market''s reach, while new modes of communication--facilitated by new technologies such as the electromagnetic telegraph and steam-powered, mechanized printing presses--transformed the ways in which Americans related to one another, assessed their expanding nation, and understood the world around them. The age was ocular, to borrow Emerson''s elliptic phrase, because so much of its proliferating culture targeted the eyes: newspapers, pamphlets, books, posters, signs, popular prints, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments. As something to be viewed, scanned, skimmed, or read, paper also functioned increasingly as a medium of perception, as a vehicle for a new kind of seeing. And just as these objects were intended to circulate, they were produced for people on the move, and thus remind us of the mobility of observers and the motility of perception. Amid this thriving print and visual culture, the eyes both saw and were seen. Eyes were considered the primary organ for visual experience and the accumulation of knowledge; yet, they were also, like so many other surfaces, to be scanned as one might gloss over a page of print. They were thought capable of penetrating discernment or indicative of a person''s inner character, virtual windows onto the soul, and yet, they themselves often failed in fits of fatigue and overstimulation. The Commerce of Vision attends to how vision was understood and experienced during this tumultuous period. To do so, it investigates how vision was rendered in the crowded visual field of antebellum America. The new visual experiences of the antebellum city produced new knowledge about vision''s capabilities and consequentially cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. But these new experiences also highlighted vision''s shortcomings within a visual field increasingly defined by a print culture premised on mobility, ephemerality, and unbridled commerce. Shifting the focus of one''s sight from the tiny print of newspapers, pamphlets, and periodicals to the boldest display types deployed on broadsides, posters, and signboards underscored for observers the necessity of maintaining the widest possible range of visual acuity. These forms stressed the importance of vision and emphasized its "normal" functioning as well as its thresholds and its limits. This thriving visual culture physically stressed the eyesight of observing subjects, while several of its many objects bore traces of the culture''s reckoning with vision''s physiological processes and problems. Emerson, who suffered from a failure of his own vision in the mid-1820s yet posited sight as a key trope in his transcendental philosophy, knew this first hand. Early in the essay Nature (1836), Emerson expounds on what has since become one of the most enduring symbols of his day: "In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." All seeing yet lacking substance, the disembodied, transparent eye floats in an infinite space. Capable of a clarity of vision often associated with the eye of God, this eyeball bespeaks a romantic seer for whom perception is all-encompassing. It was but one of several images of the all-seeing, monocular eye that graced the cornerstones of buildings, the mastheads of newspapers, and the national seal in the antebellum visual field. It was also the key component of the optical instrument known as the camera obscura, which since antiquity had served as a model for human eyesight. Widely regarded as a seminal statement of American transcendentalism, the philosopher''s lofty pronouncement is preceeded, however, by an earthly concern. For the transparent eye crucially depends on properly functioning eyesight, which involves not one but both eyes working together, as Emerson acknowledged in the previous sentence. "There is no calamity that nature cannot repair except for the debilitation of the eyes." Emerson''s trope fuses the ideal of a dematerialized, objective, and transcendent vision with a model of eyesight physiologically embedded in the mechanisms of the human body, subject to fluxes of time, space, and shifts in lighting or atmospheric conditions as well as to debility and disease. A pencil sketch by the little-known artist and Emerson accolyte Christopher Pearse Cranch playfully captures the hybridity of the philosopher''s vision (Figure 2). Embodied, though still monocular, Cranch''s eyeball sits atop an armless body with long legs. Sporting a hat and coat with tails, the figure''s long stride bespeaks a roving gaze and posits a thoroughly mobile, ambulatory vision. With top-hatted eyeball "bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space," Cranch''s gangly figure demonstrates how Emerson''s "transcendent" sight was weighted by the limitations of the body, here clothed in the fashion of the day. With coat and tails signifying his stake in the market economy, Cranch''s figure vividly acknowledges that vision, as constituent of an age that is "ocular," was ultimately grounded in broader intellectual, scientific, and commercial currents. As he wanders, the clouds above his head allude to the difficulty of seeing clearly amid the market''s obfuscating surfaces and dense networks of exchange. Similar to most Americans whose eyes failed them, Emerson''s own troubled eyesight provided the most instructive lessons in physiological optics. It is well known that Emerson suffered in the 1820s and early ''30s from a partial loss of sight resulting from a bout with tuberculosis. Suffering from an inflammation of the eye, he received treatment from Boston''s preeminent ophthalmologist, Dr. Edward Reynolds. Reynolds represented the advanced guard of ophthalmic surgeons whose efforts helped to professionalize the field during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. A student of British surgeon James Wardrop, Reynolds brought back from his training in England some of Wardrop''s methods for treating cataract and inflammation of the eye. In 1824, one year before he treated Emerson, Reynolds founded the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary. A decade of work there proved to Reynolds, writing in 1835, "that an unusual prevalence of diseases of the eye marks the period in which we live. Indeed, they are so prevalent, that they may be considered one of its common and peculiar trials." It is likely that Reynolds diagnosed Emerson with a condition that Wardrop had identified as "rheumatic inflammation of the eye," or ophthalmia rheumatica, accompanied by arthritic pains in other parts of the body. Treatment involved puncturing the cornea and evacuating the aqueous humor collected behind it. This delicate

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