Cartomania

A lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed insight into Victorian society.

Cartomania, or the creation and sharing of cartes de visite, was a Victorian phenomenon, a photographic craze that seized the public’s imagination at the beginning of the 1860s and quickly became the decade’s dominant visual medium. Small portraits, often informal and humorous, were exchanged between friends and family members and assembled into albums. This photo-sharing – the Instagram and TikTok of its day – was a new and ground-breaking development of broad social and cultural significance.

This beautifully produced book is a treasure trove of fascinating Victorian lives and stories, with idiosyncratic charm for the general reader and a wealth of detail and research for anyone interested in photography or the late nineteenth century.