Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

2. The Passing Scene: Moving Panoramas

Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel 41 for the first time to Fredric Jameson’s late twentieth-­ century description of an elevator ride in the lobby of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. Jameson describes elevators as being less a form of movement than “reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper,” in which the “narrative stroll has been underscored , symbolized, reified, and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own”(42).The passenger is denied the power to control his own movements or, ultimately, the scene that awaits him. Jameson’s elevator lands him“in one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which, seated, you are again passively rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own image by the glass windows through which you view it” (43). Los Angeles as seen from the Bonaventura, like the panorama of London as seen from the upper gallery of the Colosseum,becomes a representation of itself. Homi Bhabha describes Jameson’s anecdote as “the mise-­en-­scène of the subject’s relation to an unrepresentable social totality,” an image of the “postmodern panopticon” in which“you lose your bearings entirely” (1984, 217), but this form of disorientation and displacement does not seem distinctively postmodern compared with the Victorian experience. As we will see, the panoramic perspective provided a temporary means of projecting oneself into another space and adopting a new perspective on either a scene you thought was familiar or a place that you were“seeing” for the first time. 2. The Passing Scene: Moving Panoramas In addition to circular panoramas, the nineteenth century saw the development of an entirely new form of representation, the moving panorama. Panoramas painted on linear canvas that could be unrolled slowly while viewed from a stationary seat, usually presented in conjunction with music, commentary, or some combination of the two, developed first as backdrops to theatrical productions. In 1823, for example, a Covent Garden pantomime featured as scenery a cloth “representing bird’s-­ eye views of London and Paris supposed to be seen from a balloon”(Altick, 199).As we will see, this“balloon’s-­eye view”would continue to be a popular format for panoramas. Eventually, moving backdrops supplanted the plays they had once supplemented, and took center stage themselves. Albert Smith’s “Ascent of Mont Blanc“ and his second major monologue 42 Are We There Yet? program “Journey on the Overland Mail” were typical of this genre, in which a traveller-­ showman narrated of his journey to the sights being viewed behind him. A review of another such display, reprinted in “An Illustrated Description of the Diorama of the Ganges” (1850; JJ Coll, Dioramas 1), compared it to Smith’s performances, stating that“the mode of exhibition adopted is the same as that of the overland journey, the canvas being in continual motion, and seen through a circular opening....In other like exhibitions,we have particular spots selected; but here we have the whole length of the view as it would really be seen if passing up the river.” These displays seem generally to have aimed for a close to real-­ time pace of presentation that allowed the viewer to visually travel the landscape along with the lecturer. The transitional stage-­ setting seen in relation to stationary panoramas assumed an even more detailed form in the case of moving panoramas, which often attempted to reproduce a specific form of travel. River journeys and rail journeys were among the most popular formats, and some panoramas included replicas of excursion boats (Altick,203) or other conveyances.This continued to be a very popular feature of panoramas; as late as 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, spectators of the “Trip from Moscow to Pekin on the Trans-­ Siberian Railway” sat in“luxurious” real railway carriages, looking through real windows at a scene in which “four successive layers of landscape moved at different speeds,” simulating the effect of looking at both near and distant scenery (Comment, 74). This effect would soon be perfected and popularized in America in conjunction with moving pictures, when George C. Hale began offering “Hale’s Tours”: an“illusion ride” in which spectators of ten-­ minute films of various“Scenes of the World”sat inside a rocking railway carriage while painted scenery passed by the windows. Among the most popular subjects of moving panoramas were river journeys that provided a sense of...