Romantic Circles

Significance

As discussed by Barbara Maria Stafford, Hutton’s translated text aligns with the increased interest in rational recreations, popular leisure pursuits which were intended to simultaneously entertain and intellectually edify young people. Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy is an example of the rapid popularization of these recreational texts in the Romantic period, particularly for use in the domestic space. As noted by Helen Groth, in the nineteenth century the domestic arena “becomes a space of productive labor, where the mind of the child is actively shaped by the rationalizing energies of the family dedicated to the principles of useful knowledge” (H. Groth, “Domestic Phantasmagoria” 161). The ability not only to enjoy the illusions produced by camera obscuras, magic lanterns, and other optical devices, but, importantly, to distinguish the illusory from the real was paramount to the rational recreations agenda. As evidenced in the sustained revision, expansion, and republication of Ozanam’s original work on recreational experiments from the late seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, optical technologies and rational experiments preoccupied the Romantic visual imagination and reinforced the emphasis on edification and self-improvement through efforts at “practical education” in the domestic sphere (H. Groth, “Domestic Phantasmagoria” 161). “Plate I” of Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy reinforces the essential function of the text as both amusing and instructive, pairing illustrations of easily constructed optical experiments and technologies, such as the box camera obscura, with geometrical diagrams explaining the movement of light within them. The camera obscura shown on “Plate I” (Figure 6) is a portable device, which increases the range of amusing recreations possible to perform with it in and around the home. Rather than completely isolating and disembodying vision, however (as Jonathan Crary argues), the portable camera obscura, like other optical devices that can easily move with the observer from place to place, becomes a “visual prosthesis,” an extension of the body and the consciousness (M. Warner, “Camera Ludica” 17). Thus, this type of camera obscura functions more like the various modern models of vision discussed by Crary, which have “no reference to a spatial location” and undermine the supposedly “fixed relations of interior/exterior” (J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer 24).