This doctoral dissertation analyzes practices of looking within popular culture during the late nineteenth century. Visual attractions, illustrated press and traveling amusement shows included representations of social ills, such as poverty, criminality and prostitution. These representations were criticized in the Swedish public debate, because of their presumed negative impact on society. They were considered “far too realistic” and thus demoralizing, allegedly causing faulty ideals and creating inaccurate understandings of society. However, others emphasized the importance of beholding images, tableaus and depictions of this kind. I argue that by governing vision, certain practices of looking enabled otherwise problematic representations to become a valuable resource.

While the governing of vision in educational contexts has been frequently analyzed, the way in which vision was also governed in popular culture is less well understood. This is not surprising. At the time, it was often assumed that popular culture endangered the attentive spectator, generating an uncaring, detached mind. In addition, popular culture contained various representations of social ills, which were not educational in any obvious way. However, I argue that even these representations were potentially instructional. They were part of the creation of an orderly, responsible citizen – aware of the social problems generated by the rapidly developing society and aware of his or her responsibility to actively engage in their solutions. Hence, I argue that the governing of vision within popular culture became a means of social reform during the late nineteenth century.