180
BOOKS AND MANUALS ABOUT
PHOTOGRAPHY: 1860s
During the 1860s, with photography having become
an established feature of the Victorian world over the
preceding two decades, the medium was mature enough
to indulge in some refl ection. Over seventy textbooks
on the subject had already been published before the
end of the 1850s, and many of them had perpetuated
inaccuracies about the genesis of the medium.
In the ‘Prologomena’ of the 1934 translation of
Victor Fouque’s 1867 book The Truth Concerning
The Invention of Photography, Fouque observed “It
is evident, incontestable, that if an error is published,
it is soon, without preliminary examination, accepted
and adopted as the truth.” The error to which he was
specifi cally referring was the widespread contemporary
acceptance that Daguerre was the inventor of photogra-
phy. His purpose was to ensure proper recognition be
given to the work of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
Three years earlier, in his book The Silver Sunbeam,
Dr John Towler had also included a brief history of
photography as the fi rst chapter of his manual, and had
acknowledged the contributions of, amongst others,
Wedgwood, Davy and Niépce.
While the majority of the manuals of the 1850s
had been concerned with the publication of as many
individual variations on current processes as possible
—paraphrasing many of the process descriptions which
had already appeared in the emerging photographic
press—by the end of the decade and the beginning of
the 1860s, the structure of new books such as William
Lake Price’s 1858 Manual of Photographic Manipula-
tion (second edition 1868) refl ected the maturity of the
medium and offered descriptions of a ‘standard’ set of
processes and procedures which individual readers and
users could adapt to their own needs.
Alongside such books, later editions of several
established 1850s manuals continued the earlier more
fragmented approach and, in some cases, simply added
new processes, techniques and approaches to descrip-
tions contained in earlier editions. Thus, manuals inevi-
tably got larger. Nathan Burgess’s 184 page Ambrotype
Manual, for example, originally published in 1856, had
expanded to 283 pages.—and considerably extended its
title—by the time the twelfth edition was published in
1865 as The Photograph Manual: A Practical Treatise,
Containing the Cartes de Visite Process, and the Method
of Taking Stereoscopic Pictures, Including the Albumen
Process, the Dry Collodion Process, the Tannin Process,
the Various Alkaline Toning Baths, etc.
Thomas Sutton’s fi rst British Dictionary of Photog-
raphy—originally published in 1858 four years after
Snelling’s Dictionary of the Photographic Art—was
understandably expanded for its second edition in 1867,
refl ecting an increase in the material which demanded
to be included.
Towler’s Silver Sunbeam, originally published by
Joseph H. Ladd in New York in early 1864, quickly
became in international best seller. The earlier processes
were confi ned to the historical chapter, giving the later
sections of the book a clarity and simplicity which
contributed to its success. The initial print run of one
thousand copies sold out almost immediately in the
United States, and by the end of the fi rst year, was in
its ‘fourth edition’—although in modern parlance that
would simply be described as ‘fourth printing,’ each of
the ‘editions’ being identical. The fi rst editions were
marketed in Britain by John Atkinson of Liverpool and
publicised through his extensive catalogue of American
photographic products and ephemera, but later editions
bore the shared imprint of Ladd and London publisher
Tribner & Co.
Later editions—that continued through the 1870s
—added new material to the original as appendices,
causing the clarity of the fi rst edition to be lost. The
ninth edition fi lled almost twice as many pages as the
fi rst. A Spanish language edition El Rayo Solar, ap-
peared in 1876, with a second and third in 1884 and
1890 respectively.
Other more specialised manuals also appeared during
the 1860s—including Alfred H. Wall’s 1861 A Manual
of Artistic Colouring as Applied to Photographs, and Ed-
ward Livingstone Wilson’s 1868 treatise The American
Carbon Manual, the fi rst American textbook devoted
exclusively to the carbon process. The fi rst British book
on the process was probably George Wharton Simpson’s
On the Production of Photographs in Pigments, contain-
ing Historical Notes on Carbon Printing and Practical
Details of Swan’s Patent Carbon Process published by
Piper & Carter in 1867.
Two important books from the Belgian photographer
and scientist Desiré van Monckhoven appeared in the
1860s. A Popular Treatise on Photography, published
in 1863 with an enlarged second edition in 1867, was
translated into English by William Thornthwaite, and
published by Virtue. His Photographic Optics appeared
in 1868, under the London imprint of R. Hardwicke.
With the medium having evolved to a level where
creative considerations were assuming greater impor-
tance, several books appeared dealing with the art of
photography, and the relationship of photography with
established art forms. Important amongst these, and
translated from the original French by Thomas Sutton,
was Louis Desiré Blanquart-Evrard’s 1864 pamphlet
On the Intervention of Art in Photography.
Henry Peach Robinson’s 1869 book Pictorial Ef-
fects in Photography, Being Hints on Composition and
Chiaroscuro for Photographers, published by Piper &BOOKS AND MANUALS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY: 1860s