Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia

This book traces the various ways in which Victorian writers, photographers, publishers, and consumers translated the idea of photography into an ideal of arrested time. The possibility of arresting time was the symbolic currency of all those in the business of selling poetry to a wideraudience through popular forms such as the gift books, travel guides, magic lantern shows, working men's editions of verse, celebrity portraits, memorabilia, and mementos. Beginning with an analysis of early photographic reviewing cultures and the first photographically illustrated verse anthologiesto be published in England, Helen Groth then traces the cultural permutations of literary and cultural nostalgia that the work of poets such as Wordsworth, Scott, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and lesser-known poets such as Augusta Webster and Agnes Mary Frances Robinson inspired in Victorianphotographers, publishers, and critics alike.