1. On “virtual travel,” see, for example, Byerly, Alison, Are We There Yet? Victorian Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

2. There is an emerging body of work on the Victorians’ version of “virtual reality.” See, for example, Law, Jules, “Victorian Virtual Reality,” BRANCH: British Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Felluga, Dino Franco (accessed January 20, 2023)Google Scholar. See also Plotz, John, Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. I give a similar overview in Gilmore, Dehn, “Pigmies and Brobdignagians: Arts Writing, Dickensian Character, and the Vanishing Victorian Life-Size,” Victorian Studies 57, no. 4 (2015): 670CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. “Artificial Stone,” The Critic (November 27, 1847): 348.

5. The Victoria Terminus of Bombay's major train station exemplarily incorporated such a statue architecturally. Chopra, Preeti, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Timbrell's statue is assessed in “The Lamp of the Ganges: From the Statue by H. Timbrell, in the Possession of the Queen,” The Art-Journal 9 (September 1855): 260. The account of the Chinese Collection is from “Fashionable Lounges,” Theatrical Observer (November 11, 1844): 2. The quotation about the Crystal Palace is from “Centralisation—A Dialogue,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (October 1855): 498.

6. Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston offer an account of the rise of an ideal of objectivity in Galison and Daston, Objectivity (Princeton: Zone Books, 2010). Some of these debates about scale are treated in Gilmore, “Pigmies and Brobdignagians,” 667–90.

7. “At Madame Tussaud's,” Leisure Hour 534 (March 20, 1862): 182–84.