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Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel 59 5. Moving Pictures: The View from a Balloon While the experience of ballooning was unusual, and the views it provided unique, balloonists were not, as it turned out, at a loss for words to describe it. Virtually every balloonist who wrote about his or her experiences compared the landscape passing below to a panorama. James Glaisher, whose book Travels in the Air is the most comprehensive account of ballooning experiences from this period, describes the view as“like a grand natural panorama” (20); G. Tissandier , in an account included in Glaisher’s book, refers to“the splendid panorama which unrolls itself before our eyes” (287); and as early as 1853 an anonymous writer in Ainsworth’s Magazine says apologetically,“I need not describe the effect of this bird’s-­eye panorama—­it has already been‘done’ by abler pens than mine” (“Mr. William Johnson’s Grand Balloon Ascent,” 349). Perhaps he was thinking of Henry Mayhew’s account of a balloon journey, published just eight months earlier in the Illustrated London News. The earth, as the aeronautic vessel glided over it, seemed positively to consist of a continuous series of scenes which were being drawn along underneath us, as if it were some diorama laid flat upon the ground, and almost gave one the notion that the world was an endless landscape stretched up on rollers, which some invisible sprites below were busy revolving for our especial amusement. (Mayhew 1852, 265) This description is remarkable for the confidence with which it absorbs the visible scene into a conception of“the earth,”which here appears as an independent geographical entity, separate from and larger than man-­made political boundaries . The writer’s familiarity with the panoramic perspective gives him a context in which this previously impossible view seems to make sense. Balloon voyage and panorama descriptions share an emphasis on the viewer ’s passivity that complicates questions of agency in these narratives. In both cases, the experience seems to produce a kind of propriocentric disorientation that leads viewers to rely exclusively on their sense of vision. One of the most remarked-­ upon aspects of the balloon journey was the unexpected ease with which the balloon ascended and then proceeded horizontally. Margaret Burgoyne , in an unsigned review in Bentley’s Miscellany, marveled at the “total ab- 60 Are We There Yet? sence of any sensible motion,” asserting that the travellers felt themselves to be “perfectly stationary.” She notes the “want of feeling as regarded our bodies, of any wind or current of air; unlike the effect of all other kinds of locomotion, we were carried along with the wind, and at the same pace, instead of being conveyed through it” (530). Although the eye confirmed that movement had taken place,the body did not feel it,resulting in an impression that the landscape itself was moving. The Ainsworth’s Magazine writer begins his description of the ascent by saying ,“The earth rapidly left us. I say advisedly the earth left us, for nothing would have induced me to believe that, for the first few minutes, the balloon moved at all.” Like Burgoyne, he is surprised by the physical feeling, or rather lack of feeling ,associated with this form of travel.“I did not feel the least giddy,nor,strange to say, at all nervous; in fact, I completely forgot my situation in the enjoyment of the wonderful landscape stretched out beneath me” (“Mr. William Johnson’s Grand Balloon Ascent,” 349). The pleasure of the ride seems to depend not simply on the novel visual perspective provided,but on the way in which that visual effect was augmented by the absence of other physical sensations. Glaisher makes the same connection:“Journeying in this way was delightful; all motion seemed transferred to the landscape itself, which appeared when looking one way to be rising and coming toward us, and when looking another as receding from us” (62–­ 63). The movement of the ground below allows the balloon traveller to become the central axis against which the movement of the world is defined. Rolling and unrolling itself like a panorama, the landscape is no longer regarded as an inhabitable place. Instead, it becomes an image of a place that is comprehensive yet more comprehensible to the viewer above. Glaisher notes that from a balloon, the scenery below seemed flattened, its “surface dwarfed to a level plane, and the whole country appears like a prodigious map spread out beneath [one’s...

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