This nineteenth-century ancestor of today’s virtual reality goggles lies on a table in Dalnavert’s parlour. The stereoscope is an odd-looking handheld device made for looking at stereographic photographs. The wooden-framed goggles are wrapped in polished aluminum and edged with burnished burgundy velvet. The aluminum is stamped with a ribbon-like pattern, a world globe, and the words: Mercury Stereoscope trademark. To enjoy their stereoscope, Victorians purchased singles and sets of stereographic cards, rectangular cardboard pieces onto which photographs, each taken from a slightly different angle, are mounted side-by-side like doppelgängers. Constructed mostly of wood, the stereoscope is surprisingly lightweight. Pick it up—as if you are grabbing a ping pong paddle—and bring the goggles to your face—don’t let the musty smell put you off!—in front of your eyes are two small square glass lenses. Look through and there is a trombone-like slide onto which is clipped a stereograph. With your free hand, zoom the stereograph away from and toward your eyes until—OH!—the stereographic image— in this case, the Taj Mahal—magically appear as a 3-D illusion!¹ Dominating the structure is an enormous minaret-topped central dome roof surrounded by smaller domes. In the foreground, a long pool of still water reflects the building and a double line of Indian men, some of whom are looking at their reflections in the pool. A few other people dot the picture near the pool. A puzzle of marbled walkways and trees edge the pool. Viewing a three-dimensional version of this scene was likely breathtaking for the armchair traveller. This ubiquitous nineteenth-century amusement, like digital media today, opened up the world—both the positive and the negative—to a Victorian audience.

The twenty-first-century viewer, living in a media-obsessed world, may find it difficult to imagine how fetching—that is, eye-catching—three-dimensional photographs like this one were for nineteenth-century viewers. Photography was in its infancy at mid-century, and few had even seen a photograph—never mind a three-dimensional one. And here was the Victorian version of virtual reality in front of their flabbergasted eyes! Some Victorians, unused to the visual phenomenon of three-dimensional images, thought they were looking at real miniatures like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver in Lilliput!²

At the 1851 Great Exhibition, an “exhibition of the industry of all nations” held in London, England, Queen Victoria was reportedly so enamoured with the three-dimensional stereoscope that news of it started a viral craze—“stereoscopomania.”³ Although the story may be more rumour than substance, given that there were 13,000 exhibits including the 186-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond, and that every imaginable invention called for her Majesty’s attention, stereoscopes captured the imagination of the Victorian middle class and “spawned a new industry.”⁴

Stereoscopes, arguably the first visual mass medium, were not originally meant for amusement. In 1838, Charles Wheatstone presented the stereoscope before the Royal Society of London as a visual aid to a scientific paper.⁵ To demonstrate the theory of human binocular depth perception, he used hand-drawn figures.⁶ Developments in the history of photography took Wheatstone’s innovation in new directions. For example, in 1839, in Paris, Louis Daguerré presented his daguerréotypes, images on silver-coated copper created without the use of a negative; in England, Fox Talbot invented calotypes, or talbotypes, light-exposed pictures on paper.⁷ French optician Louis Jules Duboq refined the stereoscope, replacing mirrors with glass half-lenses which made it more portable.⁸ Then, in 1849, Sir David Brewster refined the instrument further to make it more compact, and presented his version to Queen Victoria at the aforementioned Great Exhibition.⁹ But how does it work? The stereoscope mimics the approximate 7cm separation between human eyes, using the binocular nature of human vision to converge two photographs, daguerréotypes, or glass negatives into a three-dimensional illusion.¹⁰

By 1857, The London Stereoscopic Company, whose marketing slogan was “No home without a stereoscope,”¹¹ was sponsoring photographers to travel the world. In 1860, an inexpensive and unpatented “stereopticon” model was developed by Americans Oliver Wendell Holmes and Joseph Bates.¹² In an essay for The Atlantic, a spellbound Holmes writes: “The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us.”¹³

A popular cross-generational recreation of the middle classes and the wealthy, stereoscope viewing included parlour gatherings and card trading.¹⁴ By the 1880s the price of stereoscopes was so reduced that many lower-class people could purchase and enjoy stereoscopes, making the slogan of The London Stereoscopic Company a near reality.¹⁵ The Holmes-Bates Stereopticon became so popular in North America, that as Holmes writes “any of those who are not acquainted with it must before long become as familiar with it as they are now with friction-matches.”¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, stereoscopomania waned with new media such as radio, the ‘talkies,’ and illustrated magazines.¹⁷ However, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair the stereoscope was reincarnated as the ViewMaster, a toy which is still sold.¹⁸ One can see that the etymology of the twenty-first-century virtual reality experience began in the nineteenth-century Victorian imagination.

At the height of the stereoscope’s popularity, stereographers photographed everything under the sun: current events and seances; children at play and adults at work; portraiture and still lifes; courtship vignettes and bawdy vignettes; cityscapes and landscapes—and even people looking through stereoscopes! However, some stereographs are far from benign and warrant a closer look. These include the racist representations of person of colour, scenes from Barnum & Bailey freak shows—a pejorative slur when used to describe persons with disability used here to engage a real-world historical context—and especially, “in flagrante delicto”¹⁹ pornography. These kinds of images earned stereoscopes a mixed reputation and created a moral uproar.

There is also a strong colonialist subtext to many stereographic images. As Edward Said writes in Orientalism, this was a time of rampant colonialist expansionism.²⁰ To illustrate, the stereograph of the Taj Mahal from the Dalnavert Museum collection is likely one of a 100-card boxed-set titled “India Tour” by Professor James Ricalton. The “India Tour,” marketed as part of the Underwood Stereograph Travel System also included maps, explanatory notes, and a 383-page tour guidebook²¹ These tours, which we might think of as virtual, were promoted as educational tools.²² But it is important to understand that the word educational has an historical link to fascination with the other, and that there is framing, which as Robert M. Entman writes, “involves selection and salience;”²³ that is, some things are chosen, some are left out, and some are given prominence. As Said notes, colonialism is “contained and represented by dominating frameworks.”²⁴ The “India Tour” included photographs with titles such as “The Memorial at Cawnpore to British women and children massacred by Nana Sahib (1857) India,”²⁵ “The Cashmere Gate battered by shot and shell, where the British entered (1857) Delhi, India,”²⁶ and “Trichinopoly, India, where Lord Clive once lived - [looking] N.E. across town to the fortress and famous rock (1903).”²⁷ These are memorials to the British Raj, once the world’s largest colony.²⁸ Clearly, these images promoted colonial values, including support for the British Empire, to the Victorian viewer. As Mitchell A. Winter argues, “stereoscopy can be seen as a form of surveilling currently and formerly colonized social spaces.”²⁹ The Victorian viewer was not only holding the geographical ‘miniature’ of the Taj Mahal in their hand, but was also seeing the picture as a synecdoche of their own colonialist ideologies. Ricalton’s travelogue is beautiful but it is also a curated construction of British imperial India, a construction which, as Tariq Jazeel argues, vacillates between India as the exotic East and India as primitive and undeveloped.³⁰ With historical distance, we now look through the social lens of our own time and think critically about legacies of British colonialism as well as the racism, sexism, and classism of the nineteenth century. As Richard Grassby writes: “Objects give material form to the rules and beliefs of those who trade, purchase, and use them.”³¹ The stereoscope is an entertaining object, but it is also part of Dalnavert’s complicated history. And so, it is part of our own complicated history and part of an ongoing narrative.