I’ve been learning recently about Stereocards, the Victorian craze for 3 dimensional images. These were viewed through a special Stereocard viewer, creating amazing effects. Every middle class Victorian household had a viewer and many thousands of these images were created and sold. The online course, Photography: A Victorian Sensation (created by the University of Edinburgh), has lots of information on this subject and much more. And it’s free! It also ties in with the exhibition currently at the National Museum of Scotland.
This particular Stereocard is a staged version of the famous scene from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The fascinating thing is, this card was probably made in the 1860s when Dickens was still alive. So he could have easily sat around viewing Stereocards at a dinner party and come across a scene from his own novel.
Artwork of the week 