Camille Silvy's Repertory: The Carte-de-Visite and the London Theatre

The craze for sitting for, buying, exchanging and collecting carte-de-visites was a major development in the history of photography's widening cultural currency. The commercial exploitation of this miniature portrait format in Paris at the hands of A. A. E. Disderi has been the subject of an extensive study but the scholarship that attends the carte phenomenon in Britain seems content with to credit J.J.E. Mayall's portraits of royalty for its success. This paper takes the most extensive single carte studio archive preserved in the UK, that comprised by the daybooks of Camille Silvy ( dating from c. 1860 to 1868), in order to examine the question to how this studio became known as one of the most fashionable in London even before many in the metropolis would have heard of a carte-de-visite. A previously undocumented performer series made during Silvy's first season in London provides the basis for a re-reading of his portrait venture in relation to West End comic theatre.