Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’

Jeff Rosen is Vice President for Accreditation Relations at the Higher Learning Commission

• Introduction: Taking Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’ seriously1. Saint-Pierre’s exiles: myths of origins and heritage2. Jowett’s scriptures: the moral life and the state3. Grote’s Hellenism: Victorian Parnassus on the Isle of Wight4. Byron’s ‘Beauties’: national heroines and defenders of liberty5. Overstone’s ‘Negromania’: justness and justice at home and abroad6. Tennyson’s nationalism: epic and lyric in Idylls of the King7. North’s gardens: redemption and the return to originsConclusionIndex

'Much more than a standard history, Rosen's expansive text locates, quite forensically, what is perhaps one of the most important functions of Cameron's fancies for viewers today: to trace outward, from her immediate personal, literary, and visual communities, a nexus of contentious religious, colonial and nationalist debates that helped shape, not just Cameron and her work, but the Victorian psyche itself.'Katherine Parhar, Independent Scholar, Visual Culture in Britain, 2016‘Rosen’s well-illustrated study represents a valuable resource for scholars and critics alike, and I have already recommended it to my own students. In addition to its appeal to those working on Cameron and her contemporaries, the book contains rich material for those intrigued by the visual cultural history of the nineteenth century more generally.’ - Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, Early Popular Visual Culture‘Rosen has provided an astonishingly interdisciplinary, thoroughly researched study of Cameron’s intellectual range and her technical and exhibitionary practices. He coordinates material and philosophical content discursively to raise intriguing ambiguities and to problematize common assumptions about Cameron. In doing so, Rosen reveals Cameron as a deeply intellectually engaged photographer whose works not only embodied but also shaped the philosophical cross-currents of her day.’Julie Codell, History of Photography (Taylor & Francis) December 2016‘The overworked persona of Cameron—a cartoonish figure of Freshwater fame, eccentric, domineering, least-beautiful of the Pattle sisters, forever chasing down Tennyson and his guests with her camera, forcing her servants to participate in long sessions of posing so that the household had to live off eggs and bacon—is put firmly to the side in Jeff Rosen’s painstaking, revelatory, and serious assessment of the allegorical photographs. What matters to Rosen, and, it turns out, to the photographs themselves, is history: the political exigencies of the ten-year span in which these images were made, and in which their maker intended them to make sense.’Jennifer Green-Lewis of George Washington University'Jeff Rosen offers a serious, revelatory assessment of Cameron’s allegorical works by situating them within their historical and imperial context... the delight of the book lies in its exploration of the differing ways in which Cameron 'embedded photographs with complex narratives about British colonial history'.Heather Bozant Witcher, Saint Louis University, British Society for Literature and Science‘Carefully argued, thoroughly researched, and compellingly written, this book takes Cameron’s fancy subjects seriously, and the result is a new critical and historical perspective that futher reinforces Cameron’s seminal place in the history of photography.’ Helen Groth, University of New South Wales, Victorian Studies, Vol 61, Issue 2, (Winter 2019)