'Spectacles within doors': Panoramas of London in the 1790s

'The interest of the panorama is in seeing the true city – the city indoors'.

Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (1999), 532.

In his ramble around London in Book Seven of The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth's poet proposes to 'let us view [. . . ] the Spectacles/Within doors'. His key example is the panorama:

              mimic sights that apeThe absolute presence of reality,Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land,And what earth is, and what she has to show.¹

The panorama is a large-scale landscape painting depicting a circular 360 degree view exhibited under special conditions on the inside surface of a dedicated cylindrical exhibition space. The panorama was invented in Edinburgh in 1787, and, as this essay explores, brought to completion in London in the period 1789–94. As an event, the panorama was not only a meticulously staged exhibition of a painting, but also a carefully orchestrated media event comprising advertisements, patent grants, critical commentary and satire. In this debate, the panorama was the subject of two critical discourses, one a language drawn from art connoisseurship and the science of optics, and the other, from the rhetoric of popular spectacle. Although these two discourses cohere around the same painted exhibition, they are increasingly structured by this debate as a socially-stratified opposition. Wordsworth's response to the panorama in The Prelude, although probably based on an experience of the exhibition, also reflects his engagement with the written discourse of the panorama media event.

Although the panorama dates from the late-eighteenth century, its modern historiography begins in the late 1960s, when a series of publications and research projects first subjected it to scholarly scrutiny. Pioneering work by Hubert Pragnell, Scott Wilcox, Richard Altick and Stephan Oettermann,² culminated in Ralph Hyde's innovative Barbican Art Gallery exhibition and catalogue Panoramania! in 1988.³ This archival work coincided with the 'rediscovery', preservation and restoration of surviving panoramas, such as the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, Netherlands.⁴ Although these early studies of the panorama emerged from outside the discipline of art history, they aroused considerable interest amongst practitioners of the New Art History in the 1980s, especially in the emergent discipline of 'visual culture'.⁵ In this context, the panorama has been seen as the paradigmatic point of origin for the rise of mass entertainment, the prototype for a proliferating series of exhibition spectacles (cosmoramas, dioramas, cycloramas, myrioramas, moving panoramas, phenakistiscopes) that inform the emergence of the new visual media in the nineteenth century (daguerrotype, the photograph, the stereotype, and the cinema). A key early statement of the hypothesis was indicated in Walter Benjamin's discussion of the panoramas of mid-nineteenth century Paris in The Arcades Project, which though written between 1927 and 1940, was unknown until first published in German in 1982 (and not translated into English until 1999).⁶ The visual culture reading understands the panorama as a paradigm for modern mass entertainment both as a technical achievement ('a form of reputedly stunning illusionism that approximated both cinema's visual field and time/space continuum'), but also as a watershed event in social history ('a popular medium enjoyed by mass audiences').⁷ The general arc of this argument – that panoramas lay the groundwork for photography and cinema – has been repeated and adumbrated by numerous scholars and theorists of visual culture.⁸ Nonetheless, the consistent focus of this research is teleological, and as such, it obscures the recalcitrant historical complexity that attended the panorama's emergence before its nineteenth century ascendancy. This essay, by contrast, focuses on the panorama in London in its first five years (1789–1794), and is structured around contemporary responses to the first three panorama paintings exhibited in the environs of Leicester-Square.⁹ The primary research materials, given that the panoramas themselves have not survived, are contemporary reports of viewers' experiences, printed critical remarks, visual orientation keys, commemorative prints, and the large number of printed advertisements in handbills and newspapers written by diverse, sometimes anonymous, critics, satirists and poets, Wordsworth included.¹⁰

Edinburgh in London

On 19 June 1787 Robert Barker (1739–1806), an Anglo-Irish painter working in...