This innovative, interdisciplinary study explores the Victorians' attitudes toward sight. It draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Topics discussed include blindness, memory, hallucination, dust, and the importance of the horizon--a dazzling array of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain. This richly illustrated book will appeal to anyone studying Victorian culture.