This is a book about vision and its historical fragility. It deals particularly with vision in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what might be called Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. If this were its only organizing principles it would be a vast book, indeed it would probably be a small library of books, such is the extent of scholarly interest in vision, visuality and perception. However, it has a particular focus (I recognize this pun and want to return to it in a moment). In it, I consider the role of vision across science and literature: how instruments, objects, places, people, eyes, ideologies, discourses and imaginations together make the many ways of seeing that characterize the second half of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. This is a project, largely, of cultural phenomenology. I am not interested in the things scientists or writers (and their fictional characters) saw, but what they did and thought when they looked at them, and what they said about that looking.