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.
