When Harriet Beecher Stowe writes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that because Tom is “the hero of our story, we must daguerreotype [him] for our readers” (ch. 4) and describes Marie St. Clare looking with a “dissatisfied air” at a “daguerreotype, clear and soft as an engraving, representing Eva and her father sitting hand in hand” (ch. 15), she nods to the evident fact that by the mid-nineteenth century new visual technologies of all kinds had proliferated. A number of recent studies have claimed that nineteenth-century texts were influenced by these rapidly evolving technologies, which included the still and moving panorama, ambrotype, stereoscope, tintype, and cyanotype, to say nothing of the rise of magazine illustration, which flourished in the 1880s and 1890s such that pictures on a page began to compete with words and stories in a sometimes uneasy alliance. Some of these new technologies—such as the still panorama, in...

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