112 CRITICAL READINGS swooping down!’, yet is also a ‘hard-edged world, in which most of the decorative detail is two-dimensional, executed in that kind of trompe-l’oeil which deceives nobody and is intended to deceive nobody’.8 The fact that Fevvers moves so seamlessly between the music hall and the circus, that she appears to embody the London of the turn of the century ‘of which the principal industries are the music hall and the confidence trick’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 8) and that she, like the circus, is a ‘permanent display[s] of the triumph of man’s will over gravity and over rationality’ (Pt I, Ch 2, p 105), indicates that Fevvers herself is the novel’s symbolic embodiment of the pleasures and deceits of these popular entertainments The novel, therefore, represents and investigates these popular pleasures but cannot and does not attempt to reproduce their predominantly physical and sensational effects If it carries out any ‘whirling, bouncing, whizzing’ or ‘swooping down’, it is in relation to the ideas and dramas with which it invites its readers to engage, many of which are about the new kinds of visual technology that fed popular culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which new modes of spectatorship and visual engagement were involved If Fevvers embodies some of the dominant characteristics of popular entertainments which have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (music hall, theatre and pantomime), Jack Walser, as the novel’s central representative of the ‘new world’, captures a set of more turn-of-the-century popular sensibilities Scott Bukatman has characterized a broad ‘sociocultural and phenomenological’ shift which he claims took place between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century He regards this shift as the result of the ‘development and dissemination of advanced technologies’ of vision and transport that, most importantly, led to a destabilization of the gaze and a sense of dislocation between the body and the world it attempted to capture in its sights More extensive and ‘panoramic views’ may have been newly available through these new technologies of vision (film, photography and special effects), but alongside these came what he terms a ‘kaleidoscopic perception, which was more frenetic and corporeal’ and in which ‘the spectator was no longer at a safe remove but was plunged into a jagged discontinuum of views’ He adds that ‘if the lateral glide characterized the panoramic, the kaleidoscope was the headlong rush, the rapid montage, and the bodily address’ Furthermore, he goes on to identify specifically popular forms of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century entertainments such as ‘phantasmagoria, amusement park rides [ .] and, perhaps most paradigmatically, the cinema’ as the primary sources for this new form of fast and excitable visual engagement with the world.9 Bukatman’s observations have an important bearing on Nights at the Circus, most specifically, of course, in relation to Walser, a character whose significance within the novel has often been marginalized in favour of the more obviously and powerfully spectacular Fevvers Walser and Fevvers, however, can only be fully understood in relation to each other, for both represent distinct but corresponding positions in relation to popular visual culture at a key and transitional point in Western cultural history In order to redress the critical balance, therefore, I shall begin with Walser As Angela Carter, ‘Fun Fairs’ (1977), in Uglow (ed.), Shaking a Leg, pp 342–3 Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p