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New Opportunities for Self-Reflection and Self-Fashioning: Women, Letters and the Novel in Mid-Victorian England

The unprecedented democratization of images of the self in mid-nineteenth-century England enabled Victorian subjects to encounter a range of new opportunities for apprehending, reading, interrogating and fashioning the self. Most immediately, and literally, the period saw unparalleled opportunities for physical self-reflection develop within the space of little more than a decade. In the early 1860’s a portrait photographer in the East End of London suggested to Henry Mayhew that in the event of a photographic sitting failing to produce a satisfactory portrait, he could dupe his customers into accepting a ‘specimen’ from the window display in the place of an actual photograph of the sitter: ‘The fact is, people don’t know their own faces. Half of ’em have never looked in a glass half a dozen times in their life, and directly they see a pair of eyes and a nose, they fancy they are their own’. And as implausible as that disjunction between image and identity may seem to our modern sensibilities, Alain Corbin describes a similar unfamiliarity in France: