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.