Wordsworth, Scott, and the Stereographic Picturesque

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between nineteenth-century stereo photography and the picturesque tradition. Stereo photography and the stereoscope made possible a technological extension of the principles of picturesque representation, and early landscape stereographers exploited these possibilities in ways that sometimes heightened the realism of their photographs, and sometimes distorted it. These same stereographers also extensively photographed scenes associated with the life and works of William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, creating a photographic iconography of these authors that is an essential, and as yet largely unwritten, part of their reception history. The last part of the essay attempts to sketch out this reception history, concentrating especially on the stereo photographs of George Washington Wilson and Thomas Ogle.