Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism by Alison Byerly (review)

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism addresses the way in which Victorian obsession with new modes of “virtual travel” provided British citizens with an opportunity to experience a sense of immersion via “imaginative dislocation” (10). Alison Byerly skillfully demonstrates how nineteenth-century panoramic exhibitions, river maps, railway guides, and widespread travel literature replicate the elements of virtual reality found in twenty-first century media scholarship: sense of [tele]presence, illusion of movement, dual citizenship, sense of immersion, interactivity to promote realism, and continuousness (the process of occurring over time). Furthermore, Byerly extends her research of these historic cultural conditions to shed light on the popularity of realism and the “concrete personification of the omniscient narrative voice” within nineteenth-century fiction (70). Not to be mistaken for arguing that Victorians anticipated contemporary virtual reality media, Byerly’s text instead proposes that “contemporary theories of virtuality [are] a context for understanding the nineteenth-century forms” (15).

In Part One “Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel,” Byerly discusses the widespread “panoramania” for the “quintessentially Victorian art form” (23, 30). Greatly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin, Byerly explains how the panorama—whether moving or circular—enabled the viewer as a consumer to occupy the liminal space in the dialectical movement between viewer and traveler, illusion and reality, insider and outsider, and being here and being there. Byerly writes, “[t]he panorama created a transitional, hypothetical, ‘virtual’ space that offered an opportunity to ‘try out’ a certain kind of experience or worldview” (32–33). Popular throughout London from the 1830s to the 1870s, “panorama craze” demanded dozens of exhibitions at any one time featuring one of dozens of urban cityscapes and even, paradoxically most popular, Thomas Horner’s panorama of London itself (35). The most successful displays attempted to create perspectives wherein viewers enjoyed an “immersive experience, a mediated space that would attempt to blur the boundaries separating reproduction from reality,” often through the use of elaborate stage sets to help authenticate the environment (40). Whether replicating cityscapes, river or railway journeys, or royal processions, reviewers praised vistas for their educational value while promotional advertisements claimed panoramas served as substitutes for actual travel, presenting safe and affordable emigration privileges to less financially-able classes. Byerly argues the great risk of these popular perspectives, however, lies within their “superior, almost godlike position” and promotion of detached mastery, spectatorship over entry, and condescension towards subject (62). As with Bentham’s panopticon, panoramic vistas placed British citizens “at the center of an all-encompassing view,” but instead of participating as one of Foucault’s invisible viewers, these men and women based their enjoyment, sight, and awareness as a visible and integral “traveller” of the spectacle (66). Byerly connects these associations with nineteenth-century British imperialism and colonization as attempts at replication that gave audiences an “air of knowability” that consequently and mistakenly allowed them to feel they had known, grasped, or wholly understood an “other” as an “organic whole” (66). Byerly concludes her first section by indicating how the “panoramic manner” structurally correlates to the perspective and framework of such novels as Dickens’ Bleak House (1852–53), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), by positioning the readers as hypothetical tourists who must suspend disbelief to immerse themselves within these fictive yet realistic worlds.

In Parts Two and Three, “Total Immersion: Navigating the Thames” and “High-Speed Connection: The Railway Network,” Byerly, in turn, explores the virtual reality constructed in the leisurely travel narratives of the Thames River and the changed expectations and newfound agency of virtual “telepresence” incited by the speed of railway networks, telegraphs, and telephones (25). The immersion, continuity, and linearity of verbal travel narratives not only recreated river travel experiences, but also positioned the reader as a participating explorer, likening the domestic, familiar geography of the Thames to a voyage of the alien African interior. Byerly...