ABSTRACT
The past recedes very quickly. In old photographs, friends and family look strange, dressed in oddly cut clothing, somehow impenetrable behind the familiar humanity. In their recording of instants that quickly harden into a frozen past, photographs have a distinctive pathos. Reminders of a lost presence, like the figures on Keats’ urn, photographs tease us out of thought. But they come powerfully to life when a voice seems to speak for them. The fairly crude eighteenth-century illustrations that accompany some familiar novels-Crusoe in his costume of animal skins or Pamela writing pensively, for example-are memorable only because of their link with narrative voices. These images satisfy a curiosity for external outline, a curiosity provoked by a resonant or tremulous voice that we have heard in these novels.
