Celebrity Circulation II: Dickens’s Moving/Images

By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often.  “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1]  This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that.  Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer.  Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his

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Celebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs

By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide.  The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2].  Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken.  Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing

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On the Images of Others

By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a Victorianist and a collector with an interest in photography, I decided, about a year ago, to begin amassing my own Victorian photography collection.  I soon acquired three daguerreotypes, two tintypes, and eleven cartes-de-visite—all portraits, save two.  I know very little about the images—no names, no dates, no locations beyond the photography studio imprinted on the cartes-de-visite.  I have become transfixed by how little I know about these images. Two

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