In the Victorian Era,
cartes de visite (lit. "visiting cards" - think of them like baseball cards for tea drinking) were quite the thing. Ladies would display them, showing off all the guests they'd had at their house. Then, they started cutting up their friends' pictures and pasting them into strange contexts, onto the bodies of animals or into the middle of some kind of geometric maze, decades before surrealism and photomontage had been officially discovered. It's not entirely clear what started this fashion. Likely, it was a combination of things. One speculation is that as
cartes de visite became more widely available to people outside the upper class, rich ladies felt the need to distinguish theirs further. Another deals with two books that came out within a few years of each other and which have both had a profound influence on the intellectual landscape. One was Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the other was Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species (1859). Both caused quite a stir, in very different ways, but both changed the image of what creatures could look like.
Follow the link above to see a gallery of more odd and interesting visiting card collages, along with more history and interpretation to go with it.
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