Victorian Visual Culture

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, I attended an art exhibit at the Amherst College Art Museum. While at this exhibit there was a bar of wine and mojito-like cocktails, and a large and very delicious platter of four different kinds of cheeses (!!!!!) , not to mention a scavenger hunt, I remember best a section of the museum to the right of the entrance, that features a number of portraits from the 1880’s depicting young children. There was one in particular of a little boy, maybe 11 or 12 years old. My friend Brian referred to him as “a Victorian era Justin Bieber!” Upon closer examination I saw that he was…besides his old fashioned dark boots, white collared shirt and brown vest, he did look a lot like Justin Bieber, right down to the baby-like face and shaggy blonde hair. Despite this funny discovery, I also felt a little bit sad, because I remembered our conversation at the beginning of the course about the need to document children photographically during this era in order to capture their memory, in case they died young, as so many did. I also thought about our discussion we had when reading Alice and examining the photograph in the book of Alice Liddell. I remember how shocked I was to see how…contemporary…the real Alice seemed. She looked like the little girl on my block who I babysit. As silly as it may sound, this image, paired with the Justin Bieber look alike over in Amherst, adds a very human element to the subjects that we’ve been studying.