ABSTRACT
The action of looking backwards marks a distinctly nineteenth-century approach to the intersection of past and present in historical writing. In contrast to earlier ages when ardent history enthusiasts were isolated as a dusty class of antiquarians and pedagogues, the Victorians as a society desired desperately to see and feel the past as it was, through artefact, photograph, and visual experience. There is a poignant awareness in Victorian literature that the act of looking backwards is a fleeting one at best, involving 'magical speculums' which all too soon reduce both view and viewer to ghosts in the landscape of memory. Taking a radically original approach, Alexander Carlyle introduces a variety of visually-oriented time machines in his books, the two most memorable of which are the 'camera lucida' and the 'magical speculum'. For Carlyle the historian vision is an ocular manifestation - an act of seeing as a vehicle for transportation to the past.
