The Overland Mail

In the nineteenth century, the moving panorama was an important means of helping British audiences envisage the global circulation of goods, people and information. The fictional Phileas Fogg was fortunate and wealthy enough to be able to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days; however, for the majority, a two-hour panorama show at their local town hall or mechanics’ institute was much more likely to shape their experience of the globalised, economically interdependent nation that industrial Britain was becoming. The moving panorama provided an embodied experience of the new global mobility of goods and people, and, as importantly, of a ‘mobile’ subjectivity that could range over continents and be simultaneously ‘plugged’ into discontinuous spaces. Tim Cresswell has argued that ‘ways of conceiving of mobility itself – not just mobility between nations, regions and places – are often informed by a desire to fix what is unfixable in order to make it knowable within a clear spatial framework.’ ¹ The moving panorama was an aesthetic form that made knowable a modernity founded on movement and mobility, and it is no surprise that the height of its influence coincided with a rapid period of the opening up of global spaces and networks. It is no coincidence that some of the most popular shows of this period – the Overland Mail, the Pacific Railway from New York to San Francisco, Hamilton’s Excursions Around the World, the umpteen emigration panoramas – familiarised audiences with the international routes and networks that were facilitating the movement of so many commodities and people. The moving panorama was an important cultural form for ordering and assimilating the global into its audience’s sense of their imagined locatedness in the world.