Shutter' from Adam Thorpe's Ulverton: its twofold relation to history

is dated to 1859, and the 1850s, which were the ‘golden age’ of photography, saw a great number of photographic publications.

As is well known, photography was invented in the 1830s, so in 1859 this art was still a novelty, though quite popular and it was popularized in a special way.

Much of the photography that was produced in the nineteenth century,... was created with the earlier model of prints and large books or albums in mind, and often intended to serve as illustration, even when exhibition was also envisioned. <...> ...careful examination of the history of photography suggests that the photographic book has been not only one of the medium’s foundational projects but one of the primary means of its cultural recognition” [Brunet 2009: 35].

It should be noted that as soon as photography came into being it began to interact with literature. As Ari J. Blatt points out in his article, photography and literature have been involved in an almost constant dialogue and process of intersemiotic cross-fertilization since the advent of the new medium [Blatt 2009: 108]. According to Francois Brunet, it was William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, “who inaugurated, most concretely and brilliantly, photography’s alliance with the book and thereby the figure of the photographer as author” [Brunet 2009: 36]. It was Talbot’s book The Pencil of Nature (1845) that was the first encounter of the new art with literature as it contained its author’s comments on the photos included in it, thus becoming the first photographic book.

In my opinion, Adam Thorpe’s "Shutter’ was devised as a kind of photographic book, (though without inclusion of any photos) to illustrate this popular mid-19^th century artefact. The story is structured as a series of commentaries to seventeen virtual photos, or plates; thirteen of them are records of various places and villagers of Ulverton, the other four are dedicated to archaeological excavations in Egypt. The commentaries, which according to the fashion of the time, were to be situated on the pages opposite the photos, are fairly lengthy.

The anonymous author of both the photos and the commentaries is herself an inhabitant of Ulverton, well acquainted with the history of the village and its dwellers. Thorpe’s heroine is portrayed as a fairly experienced and enthusiastic photographer who engages in the medium for its own sake, though, as she herself acknowledges, sometimes makes portraits of the village VIPs to earn some money for her own living and her servants’ maintenance.

The photos depict various places of Ulverton - the river Fogbourn, its bridges and roads, its blacksmith’s shop and manor house as well as portraits, some of them collective ones, of villagers -of a peasant woman, a school teacher, a priest and servants. In her commentaries, the narrator recalls the historical events, legends and life stories associated with the subjects of her plates. Some of the photos are landscape sketches either with human figures or without; here the photographer herself acknowledges that her romantic perception of nature conflicts with blatant realism:

In a commentary to the photo of a woman carrying ‘sturdy buckets on a sturdy yoke filled to the brim’ the narrator makes an allusion to the scene of Christ’s encounter with a young girl at a well and calls on her readers to recall the photo while reading this biblical scene. Here she, undoubtedly, aims at stressing the difference between the ‘heavy-shouldered truth’ and ‘whirling drapery of Illusion’ [Thorpe 1998: 177] and at arousing compassion for the peasant’s hard lot.

What substantiates our idea of "Shutter’ as a sample of a photographic book is its narrator’s use of ‘dear viewer’ and other forms of addresses to her readers, as among them, she supposes, there may be people interested in the art itself. The plates are numbered, yet the numbering starts with plate XXV which creates the impression that their author must have selected the best pictures out of her rich collection. In her commentaries she refers to photography as ‘Nature’s pen’, which echoes the title of Talbot’s book, or ‘the new art of the lens’; she calls her vocation ‘my humble lens’ while her colleagues are referred to as ‘photographic artists’ and ‘my contemporaries in the field of both plate and canvas’.

The very choice of a female photographer for the chapter’s protagonist is symptomatic: in the 19th century the new art was very popular with women. Thorpe’s heroine humorously remarks

.. .we gentler sex have a distinct advantage, for what better use my otherwise cumbersome crinoline, than as a type of black hood or cover?

- if pockets be cut into the material, so that the camera may be held within and remain unseen” [Thorpe ibid: 169].

As becomes known from the next chapter of the novel, "Stitches’ dated 1887, the heroine of "Shutter’ was known among her со-villagers as Miss Peephole, the nickname evidently referring to her habit of using a camera at every opportunity. By bitter irony after her death the illiterate peasant narrator of "Stitches ’ uses her plates for covering his cabbage sprouts.

Naturally the emergence of photography entailed the problem of its correlation with traditional forms of visual art, especially painting. In The Pencil of Nature Talbot expresses his hope that photography will be able to compete with painting, and in one of his commentaries he remarks on the former’s closeness to the Dutch painting. Thorpe’s heroine also makes a reference to Dutch masters when poetically describing her camera’s ability to grasp the effect of glittering drops of water from each straw of a thatched roof: “.. .as the Dutch painters once caught the sheen of silk, or the exquisite hint of canker in a peach’s bloom, upon their small canvases” [ibid: 173]. She makes allusions to other artists, too, for example, the clouds floating over Ulverton remind her of the paintings by the German romantic painter K.D.Friedrich (1774-1840); she daringly declares that even great Leonardo da Vinci might have envied the clarity and precision of photographic images. In her enthusiasm for photography she does not only stress photography’s parity with painting but more than once she asserts the former’s advantage over the latter: “...lam emboldened to suggest that no brush, wielded by whatever genius could fashion the rushing water about the rocks so fine as my humble lens” [Thorpe 1998: 167]. She evidently echoes Talbot’s idea that photography can «introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details ... which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully” [Cit. from Brunet 2009: 42], when addressing her potential readers and viewers: “And here, dear viewer, note what riches are to be found if only the eye would seek them out” [Thorpe 1998: 172]. The narrator marks people’s preference of photography to portrait painting and accounts for it thus:

The portrait study, with its long ancestry, and its popularity with those who wish their features, at a certain moment in life, to be recalled without the smoothing generosity of the painter’s brush, remains the most easily facile, of all photographic subjects [Thorpe 1998: 179].

She opposes the naturalness of photographic records of life’s fleeting_moments to the artificiality of painting created during long hours in an artist’s studio:

Far preferable, to my mind, is the human subject when revealed in its natural habitat, than in the studio: how much more possible this is, with the instantaneous brush of the photographer’s art,than with the slow dab of the painter’s” [Thorpe 1998: 181].

Besides giving minute descriptions and comments on her own photos the narrator ventures to make suggestions to her potential colleagues. Thus she advises other photographers to thoroughly place objects - things and people - on a plate, to be always ‘on the watch for Nature’s tiny miracle’ [Thorpe 1998: 171]

As it has been mentioned above, four of the imaginary plates were made during the excavations in Egyptian pyramids where the narrator worked together with two famous but fictitious archaeologists, Wallis Dobson and Stephen Quiller. The reason why Adam Thorpe “sent” his heroine to Egypt is clear: it was England who pioneered the research of ancient civilizations and acquisition of their artefacts and in the 1850s English photographers were actively involved in recording the landscapes and monuments of the East. It brought about a tremendous boost in publications of photographic books and albums on the Orient, Francis Frith’s Egypt and Palestine (1857) being the most famous of them. Thus Thorpe’s heroine was one of the numerous photographers who rushed to the East to make their records of ancient monuments, and her mysterious sudden disease and death (the commentary on the last plate ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence) resemble the tragic destiny of some researchers of pyramids. The narrator of the next chapter ‘Stitches’, an illiterate peasant, explained the reason for her death thus: ‘they didn’t find nowt wrong wi’ just a kind о’curse they said as come out о’some old king’s tomb’ [Thorpe 1998: 198].

Being one of the chapters of a historical novel "Shutter’ is related to history in two ways. Firstly, it contains a detailed account of the villagers’ mode of life in the middle of the 19^th century, of their relationships, problems, joys and sorrows. Secondly, by making his heroine a mouthpiece of the ideas and views on photography current at the time as well as an active and enthusiastic practitioner of the new art, Thorpe throws light on the cultural developments of the period: the popularity of the medium, the phenomenon of a photographic book, the controversy about the correlation of photography and painting, etc.

It should also be noted that "Shutter ’ with its synthesis of verbal and visual representation is an ekphrastic work, or, to be more precise, it is an example of phototextuality which is one of the constructive ways to vary narrative strategies and introduce new means of delineating characters.