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“A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet”: Virtual Travel and The Panoramic Perspective

2007; Routledge; Volume: 29; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905490701584643

1477-2663

Alison Byerly,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] The terms "panorama" and "diorama" were often used interchangeably, but technically a panorama is an expansive, completely circular painting, usually of a city or natural landscape; or conversely, a large, moving scroll containing a linear representation of a scene or series of scenes. The term was also used for linear depictions on a much smaller scale, such as the fold‐out "panoramas" often included in guidebooks. The sense of a "panorama" as a broad (real) vista seems to have developed shortly after painted panoramas became popular, and the word was soon extended further to attain its current usage as a name for a broad survey of any subject. [2] See, for example, Schivelbusch, and Kern. [3] Altick's discussion in The Shows of London remains the best exposition of the place of the panorama within the entertainment culture of nineteenth‐century England. Richard Hyde'sPanoramania!, the catalog of a 1998 Barbican exhibition, provides a well‐illustrated overview of panoramas and related artifacts of the period. Stephen Oetterman's The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, cogently describes its origins, technical features, and development in each of the countries (England, France, Germany, Austria, and the United States) where it played a significant role in the history of mass entertainment. Bernard Comment's lavishly illustrated The Panorama, covers much of the same territory but is organized thematically, with greater emphasis on the panorama's relation to eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century aesthetic theories and practices. The fact that Oetterman's book originally appeared in German, and Comment's book in French, suggests the importance of the panorama in European culture. [4] This essay will make frequent reference to advertisements, handbills, and guidebooks from the British Library (BL), the Museum of London (ML), and the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (JJ Coll). Guidebooks or multipage pamphlets with publication information are listed in the Works Cited, and will be referred to by title. For advertisements and other pieces of printed matter, I will give a parenthetical reference to the location of the material (e.g., JJ Coll, Dioramas Box 1). [5] See John M.L. Drew's essays on Dickens and travel. Drew notes that Dickens was very familiar with the earlier literary tradition of the creation of a narrator or persona who was an "insubstantial, peripatetic entity" and suggests that this influenced his frequent use of such personae in essays that "consist in the account of a journey, tour, walk, ramble, strut, stroll, or 'lounge' through some familiar … landscape (often urban) which derives humor and often a satirical component from invoking the narrative of 'real' voyages and travels" ("Voyages" [Part One] 79). [6] Both Oetterman and Comment make the irresistable comparison between terms that describe "round structures built around a central observation platform that is isolated from the periphery" (Oetterman 51). Oetterman cites Foucault's own footnote, in Discipline and Punish, querying, "'Was Bentham aware of the Panoramas that Barker was constructing at exactly the same period(?)'" (Oetterman 41, n.108). Comment connects the "all‐knowing and all‐seeing" (142) perspective of both the panorama and the panopticon with other architectural manifestations of the "Uberblick, the gaze from above" (141).