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.The sedan-chair style camera obscura illustrated here is heavily implicated in a revision of Jonathan Crary’s contentions concerning the disembodied vision facilitated by the apparatus and its ability to remove the viewer bodily from the scene on display, here projected neatly onto a tabletop (a similar sedan-chair camera obscura is reproduced in J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer 28). Not only does this type of camera obscura allow the observer to obscure him or herself within it, but it also accommodates only one person at a time, furthering the effect of isolated viewing. This contrasts strongly with a portion of the text of Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy—a remark obviously added by the Englishman Hutton—that describes the camera obscura on top of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. The appropriate venue for a properly edifying and entertaining outing, this room-sized camera obscura was “capable of containing five or six persons, all viewing the exhibition together. All the motions of the glasses are easily performed by one of the persons within, by means of attached rods; and the images are thrown on a large and smooth concave table, cast of plaster of Paris, and moveable up and down so as to suit the distances of the objects” (J. Ozanam and C. Hutton, Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy 183).As can be seen from this description, the camera obscura on top of the Royal Observatory, intended for a group of observers, functions quite differently than the sedan-chair style apparatus as a metaphor of vision. Rather than the isolated spectator obscured within the space of the camera obscura, the Royal Observatory creates a collective, public experience for viewing. The communal aspect of the Royal Observatory camera obscura, as well as the ability to move the projected image to achieve different views, more closely resembles the nineteenth-century diorama, cited by Crary as exemplary of “the ‘uprooting’ of vision from the more inflexible representational system of the camera obscura” (J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer 113). Thus, although the image of the sedan-chair camera obscura reiterates Crary’s contentions, the text of Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy offers an opportunity to expand on the camera obscura as a model of vision in the Romantic period.