In stories like “In Love with a Daguerreotype” (1859) and “The Twin Daguerreotypes” (1855), a glance at a woman’s portrait throws her male viewer into such frenetic delight, he either hides her image under his pillow for months or travels thousands of miles cross-country to reach her home. The trope was so common that Harper’s spoofed the emerging genre in an 1855 satire in which two daguerreotypes fall in love. The article sardonically notes that such a love affair “is scarcely to be wondered at,” considering its occurrence is “very frequent among the class of human species.” By human species, the caustic Harper’s writer more accurately meant fictional species. There is little evidence, from wedding announcements to newspaper articles, that couples regularly met from a stray glance at each other’s daguerreotypes. And yet in penny press romances, it appeared a generation of young people were leaping into lightning-fast engagements, entranced by a few silvery inches of a stranger’s face.
The American daguerreotype craze began on April 20, 1839, when the inventor Samuel F.B. Morse traveled to Paris and wrote a glowing letter to his brother about the new technology pioneered by the French artist Louis Daguerre. In Morse’s letter, later published in the New York Observer, he praised the daguerreotype as “one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age,” capable of rendering “perfect representations of the human countenance.” Months later, Morse and other American scientists began experimenting with Daguerre’s invention. By 1853, between 13,000 and 17,000 individuals offered daguerreotype services in America. Because daguerreotypes weren’t as costly as paintings, which involved multiple sittings and hours of labor, images became newly accessible to the middle class. For the first time, the people represented in pictures weren’t exclusively rich and royal, which meant it was newly realistic, and possibly even in reach, to covet the subjects of such images.
You might encounter unknown faces in studios, homes, pockets, or even carelessly dropped on the street. But even as daguerreotypes became common objects, they retained an intensely intimate association. Daguerreotypes were typically exchanged between loved ones; family members carried miniatures in lockets, friends exchanged images as tokens of affection, new couples framed pictures in wedding attire. Although the images occasionally served a more commercial purpose—to attract patrons, daguerreotypists occasionally displayed client portraits, and some shops sold images of famous authors, politicians, generals, and actors—if you saw a portrait in a locket or a frame, it was likely because they were special to you. Perhaps a stranger’s daguerreotype evoked a feeling of transgressive familiarity, a sense of witnessing someone from an improperly close distance.