This book explores the role of vision and the culture of observation in Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles - small, large, past and future - to survey Victorian conceptions of what vision was. He then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing, when anxieties over visual 'truth' became entwined with modernist rejections of objectivity.

"'In explaining the role played by literary narratives in the history of science, and specifically in the visual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Willis shows both scientists and novelists at their most human, both driven by wonder and rigor, method and imagination.'"