The beginning of modernity was accompanied by the predominance of vision over the other senses. As Norbert Elias has shown, clothing and manners were cultivated and codified in an attempt to externalise subjectivity. For Victorian liberals, this situation presented both opportunities and a source of anxiety. Since the Victorian citizen was aware that he or she was observed by others who were aware that he or she was also observing them, this interplay removed externally imposed barriers to individual freedom and replaced these with an autonomously regulated mechanism that encouraged the citizen to behave well, thus providing a form of positive liberty (Otter 2008). At the same time, advances in Victorian physiology indicated that the potential of this perspective was limited because it hypothesised that attention was regulated by the nervous system, which meant that observation was guided by reflexes rather than the will, instinct rather than intention (Dames 2007): the Victorians ‘feared that these signs [encoded in their clothes and their speech] were equally beyond their power to mould, but would instead be manifest to others in involuntary tricks of speech, body gesture, or even how they adorned themselves’ (Sennett 1976: 25). This anxiety gave a renewed impetus to the rules of politeness and the study of physiognomy: a thorough knowledge of these codes provided guidelines with which to interpret ‘unconscious’ signs. Unlocking a knowledge that was ‘potentially open to all’ (Otter 2008: 51), politeness and physiognomy created the possibility of a ‘democratisation of observation’ (Hartley 2001: 41).

This possibility could only be realised in a public sphere where the conditions for sight and observation were excellent. Poorly lit and mired in fog, however, early nineteenth-century London presented all sorts of problems for those who wanted to foster liberal subjectivity through vision.