Guest Editor's Introduction: How Do We See?

Abstract

How do we see?  And how do we learn to see? These two questions, despite being highly similar, are far from identical.  An increasing number of mid-Victorian commentators, who considered the act of looking from the entwined perspectives of science and culture, investigated them. They explored and explained connections between the physiology and psychology of vision; the relationship between looking, attention, and ocular selection; and the variations in modes of seeing that come about through occupation, environment, and the spaces of sight. These, too, are the issues at the heart of the stimulating essays in this issue of Victorian Network.