19th-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the pre-eminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over such topics as the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they being to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period.