Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing the Big Picture (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) 3031156838, 9783031156830

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Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain Seeing the Big Picture Helen Kingstone

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor

Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800-1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Helen Kingstone

Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain Seeing the Big Picture

Helen Kingstone Department of English Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, UK

ISSN 2634-6494     ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-15683-0    ISBN 978-3-031-15684-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

First and heartfelt thanks go to Rosemary Mitchell, for her generous support of this project in its early stages, her truly twinkling enthusiasm and for supporting many others in similar ways before her untimely death in 2021. This project grew out of the questions that my first book (completed at Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds Trinity University) had left unanswered, and I took it, in rather disparate pieces, up to my next temporary lectureship at the University of Glasgow. There, it grew into book shape with the help of my colleagues, especially the informal peer-review group led by Faye Hammill. Thanks to a Surrey Research Fellowship at the University of Surrey, I was then able to make it my main work focus (with a slight baby-shaped hiatus) over the past three years, for which I am very grateful, with particular thanks to Beth Palmer for her supportive and reassuring mentorship. Several wise scholars have helped shape and direct the project when it has most needed it. Clare Pettitt helped propel it into being through pointing me toward panoramas. Her insights in conversations and feedback, and through her own concurrent scholarship, have been invaluable. Lawrence Goldman’s teaching a long time back set me thinking about “Victorian intellect and culture”, and I haven’t really stopped since. I have also appreciated the chance to ask his opinion, as former Editor of the Oxford DNB, about the aims of the Victorian DNB. The important field of Memory Studies is one that I wish I had begun exploring earlier, and Astrid Erll has been instrumental in helping me navigate it, both in her publications and generously via email and Zoom. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited enormously from feedback from friends and colleagues via “chapter swaps”. The wonderful (and intellectually incisive) Nicola Kirkby read the introduction, conclusion and panoramas chapters; Karin Koehler read the chapter on Thomas Hardy; Fariha Shaikh read the photography chapter; Helen Goodwyn read on Review of Reviews; Charlotte Mathieson read on Men of the Time; Eve Colpus read on the DNB. (Karin and Fariha, I still owe you the return favor!) And Rhian Williams and Emily Bell kindly read two other chapters (on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and corpus linguistics, respectively) that I hope to publish separately. This input reminds me of the friendship that can emerge from scholarly support and vice versa and the huge value of a fresh perspective. Many thanks to Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous peer reviewer who gave me confidence that this manuscript did hang together as a book and to Literature editors Molly Beck and Marika Lysandrou for their sterling work. Joseph Bristow read the proposal and manuscript with the attention, precision and ambition for the project that I so value. Thank you for the support of my research over many years. Inevitably, this book came home with me (particularly during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but also on either side of maternity leave). Dan has lived with the book day-to-day throughout and kept me sane—please keep doing it! Toby’s impending arrival gave me the firmest possible deadline for submitting my manuscript for peer review, and his baby-sized grins and shrieks put work into perspective. Jannet, Erik and Kamie have supported me always—though they and Dan get extra heartfelt thanks for mucking in on the final check for typos.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Overviews of the Present  1 Big Data and Distance   8 Memory and the Contemporary  13 Methodology and Outline of the Book  18 Part I Panoramic Perspective  25 2 Contemporary  History in Panoramas 27 Panoramas of Contemporary History  33 Narrative Through Paratexts  44 Panoramic Overview Through Immersion  54 Conclusions  61 3 Panoramic  Perspective in Histories of the French Revolution: Thomas Carlyle Versus Archibald Alison 63 Temporal Overview  67 Social History  76 Conclusions  84

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4 The  Napoleonic Wars from Near and Far: Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts 87 Proximity and Distance  88 We Are All Contemporary Historians  98 Napoleon 102 Conclusions 105 Part II Transition: Between Panoramas and Compilations 107 5 Photography  Remediated in the Crimean War: Illustration, Exhibition and Collection109 Photography and Panoramas in the Crimean War 113 Compilations of Photography 133 Conclusions 143 Part III Big Data: Compilations of Contemporaneity 145 6 An  Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data Compilations and the Review of Reviews147 A Brief History of Nineteenth-Century Compilation 148 Big Data and Compilations 156 The Review of Reviews: A Compilation of Contemporary History  159 Innovative Compilation Practices in Review of Reviews  167 Conclusions 176 7 Ephemeral  Collective Biography in Men of the Time (1852–99)179 What Was Men of the Time? 183 Whom to Select? 186 How to Be Superseded 190 Reception and Usage 195 Conclusions 197

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8 Collective  Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography199 Why So Many Nineteenth-Century Lives? 204 Challenge 1: Whom to Include? 206 Challenge 2: Size and Scope 212 Challenge 3: Office Politics 216 Challenge 4: Auto/Biography and Personal Knowledge Remediated 222 Conclusions 232 9 Conclusions:  Overview Through Immersion235 From Panoramas to Compilations 235 Remediation and Intermediality 238 Trust, Big Data and the Big Picture 240 Bibliography243 Index273

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Robert Mitchell, “Cross-section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square” (1801), in British Library 56.i.12. (Plate 14). Digital image in the public domain, courtesy of British Library online prints collection. Shelfmark 56.i.12. (Plate 14) 28 Panoramas scholarship has typically plotted the form on one of these two axes. Diagram author’s own 31 Key plate from Description of the Defeat of the French Army, in Front of Waterloo, on the 18th of June, 1815; Now Exhibiting in Barker’s Panorama, Strand, near Surry Street [sic] (London: J. Adlard, 1816). Reproduced by permission of University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections 37 Key to Burford and Selous, panorama of The City of Paris, taken from the Place de la Concorde (1848), in BLRB.23.a.31854 (British Library). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library40 Photograph of program to Panorama of Algiers, 19. Reproduced by permission of University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections 52 ‘Views in the Crimea’, Illustrated London News, 10 February 1855, 129, from British Newspaper Archive. Permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library 123 Roger Fenton, “Sevastopol from the Mortar Battery” (April 1855), Royal Collection Trust RCIN 2500512. Permission granted courtesy of Royal Collection Trust 124

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

[Edward Angelo Goodall], “The War in the Crimea”, Illustrated London News, 8 September 1855, 293, British Newspaper Archive; permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library 128 Illustration from “Sebastopol after the Siege”, Illustrated London News, 3 November 1855, 1. Newspaper Archive; permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library 130 Charles George Lewis’s engraving of Thomas J. Barker’s painting The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol (1856). Permission granted courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust 132 Key plate to Thomas J. Barker’s painting The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol. Permission granted courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust 134 Day & Son (I, active 1850s–1880s), Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol., 1856, Lithograph. 41.6 × 116.2 cm (16 3/8 × 45 ¾ in.), 84.XM.1028.80. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program135 “Contents of the Leading Reviews”, The Review of Reviews, January 1890, 28. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, shelfmark Per. 3977 d.69 169 “Composite Photograph of the Cabinet”, The Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): plate facing 316. Photograph author’s own, from own copy 175 Seating plan for DNB’s celebratory dinner, June 1894. Reproduced by permission of University of London, Senate House Library, MS900/3/68 221 Letter from A. F. Pollard to his parents, 5 June 1894. Reproduced by permission of University of London, Senate House Library, MS860/2/1 222

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Overviews of the Present

What does it mean to gain an overview of an era while living through it, and why is it so difficult to achieve? This study looks at the shifting strategies that people used in nineteenth-century Britain to generate such an overview, amid ever-increasing material. I argue that the two main ways of imagining and seeking an overview were the panorama and the compilation. In their narrowest senses, panoramas are huge 360° paintings often used to represent recent historical events, while compilations are structured collections of objects, images or records. As a result of these narrow definitions, the panorama and compilation have until now been in separate disciplinary boxes, attended to by art history and history of science, respectively.1 They have also routinely been associated with different periods: the panorama was a Romantic-era invention, while the most high-­ profile compilation publishing projects (such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Dictionary of National Biography, DNB) took place toward the end of the nineteenth century. However, I argue that nineteenth-­ century attitudes to understanding modernity were 1  For recent indications of the scholarship in each respective field, see Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) and a 2017 special issue of the History of Science Society journal Osiris: Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski, “Introduction: Historicizing Big Data”, Osiris 32, no. 1 (September 2017): 1–17.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_1

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fundamentally rooted in first a panoramic and then a compilation-based way of looking at the world. The panoramic and compilation models, different as they are, sought to deal with a common concern: the question of how to generate an overview on the perceived scale of their contemporary era. The sense of living through times of unprecedented scale and change—since the late eighteenth-­ century Age of Revolutions—has often been summarized under the multifarious category of “modernity”.2 The term indicates a period of hugely accelerated growth in technological, geographical, demographic and social scale, which makes it increasingly difficult to gain an overview on these shifts or their results. Here, I examine “modernity” in its temporal and social dimension: the challenge of how to represent historical events and populations that seem too large scale to be shown in their totality.3 In the nineteenth century, changes that would previously have taken place across centuries now happened within decades. Contemporaries therefore could not comment on these changes from outside, as if they were happening to some other society. I show how writers, artists and data-collectors tried to get to grips with the unwieldy scale of modernity’s contemporaneous events and personnel, and the unnerving speed at which those would be superseded.

2  “Modernity” has been variously defined as ushering in a new approach to the individual (in philosophy via John Locke and J. S. Mill), to the centralized state (in political history), to relationships between parts of the world (in postcolonial studies), to technology and the natural world (variously in history of science and ecocriticism) and to time (in cultural history and theory). On sense one, see Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). On senses two and three, see Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds., Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). On sense three, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). On sense four, see James C.  Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On sense five, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 3  Stephanie O’Rourke has recently discussed the flipside of this in relation to deep time, namely, how our inability to observe its geological changes from within human lifetimes “marks ‘real epistemological limits’ on human perceptual experience”. Stephanie O’Rourke, “Staring into the Abyss of Time”, Representations 148, no. 1 (2019): 49. She quotes here from Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, New  York: Cornell University Press, 2004), 12.

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Our twenty-first-century concern with “unprecedented times” and an “Anthropocene age”, while recent in its specifics, is the result of a long-­ standing need to understand our own place in bigger historical timeframes and in the overall arc of history. While we might feel that now is the moment that most urgently needs to seek this understanding, the nineteenth century was arguably the most invested in doing so. Studying their responses to these issues can offer us valuable insights and alternatives to our own approaches. The panorama became widespread, diversified and embedded in European and North American popular culture.4 I focus on the original format, invented in 1787 on the eve of the French Revolution. These were enormous 360° paintings, which had purpose-built rotundas made for them including one that still stands, invisible to most passersby, in Central London’s Leicester Square. Panoramas often represented recent historical events, boldly and provocatively turning news into history. I then show how a figurative version of panoramic perspective was adopted by historians, poets, journalists and photographers, adapting and extending its powers in the process. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the compilation model of overview became powerful and widespread in its turn. The second half of my discussion reveals how it was used for envisaging utopian photographic archives that could supersede reality; for a periodical that would digest and potentially supersede all other periodicals; and for collective biographies that aimed to go beyond narrow, elite or reverential halls of fame to give readers a handle on the changemakers of their time. My closing case study, the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901), was an enormous production that took over fifteen years, generated sixty-six volumes and recounted the lives of over 34,000 individuals, but is now rarely studied due to lost archives and the sheer challenge of its scale. I bring these wide-ranging media back to life and back into comparison. The panoramic and the compilation models of overview were not exclusive to any one form or medium, but were widely remediated across manifestations including history-writing, fiction and epic poetry, photography, sociological surveys, museum displays and collections, digests of the news and collective biographies. This is therefore also an account of 4  One Balzac character even uses the neologism’s dramatic suffix to add emphasis to nouns from “sexorama” to “death-orama”. Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot, ed. George Saintsbury (New York: The Reviews of Reviews Co., 1900), 196, 268.

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remediation (the way that apparently media-specific techniques and principles are adopted and translated from one medium to another) and intermediality (media exchanging characteristics in both directions). When J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin coined the term remediation, they were drawing attention quite precisely to “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms”.5 I showcase such logics and processes in some parts of this study, particularly in relation to panoramas, photography, wood engraving in periodicals and halftone printing, all of which emerged as “new media” within the long nineteenth century. I also use the concept of intermediality to propel us in further directions. Part I’s latter chapters argue that panorama’s elevated perspective was remediated into textual forms that were far from being “new media”, as writers used what Irina Rajewsky calls “intermedial references” to conjure up figurative panoramas.6 Then, as I delineate in the transitional Chap. 5, photography was originally seen as a supplement to pre-existing media including panoramas and history-painting, before its developing affordances also fed back into and subsequently shaped manifestations of those media. In addition, various genres were less formally distinct than they are now, as we see in Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that “history is the essence of innumerable biographies” and in Henry Mayhew’s use of life-story interviewing for statistical social research, as also in a 360° painting of the “History of the Century” made for the 1889 Parisian Exposition Universelle, complete with 650 identifiable figures, of which one newspaper wrote: “Is it a panorama? Better, it’s a museum of contemporary history”.7 My inquiries range capaciously to demonstrate, first, the profound intermedial influence of panoramic perspective in the first half of the nineteenth century and, secondly, the diverse types of compilations that influenced iconic finde-siècle projects such as the Dictionary of National Biography. 5  J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, First MIT press paperback edition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 273. 6  Irina Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality”, Intermédialités : Histoire et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres et Des Techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, no. 6 (2005): 52, 54, https://doi.org/10.7202/1005505ar. 7  [Thomas Carlyle], “Thoughts on History”, Fraser’s Magazine, November 1830, 414. For Mayhew, see Chap. 6. On the History of the Century painting by Henri Gervex and Alfred Stevens, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-­ Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 163. Quote originally from newspaper L’Evènement, 4 October 1888.

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Scholarly discussions on these media have tended to agree that they were powerful forms, but disagreed on how they achieved their effects. As I outline in Chap. 2, some scholars have followed a Foucauldian line in viewing the panorama as the agent of an aloof, distanced, judgemental, xenophobic and ultimately imperial gaze, while others have instead emphasized its immersive qualities, positing the panorama as a precursor to cinema and to twenty-first-­century virtual reality technologies. I argue that we need to understand the panorama’s power as lying in its ability to offer overview through immersion. A visitor would be surrounded by and potentially overwhelmed by—immersed in—a scene, and then by parsing the constituent parts of that scene, with the aid of labeled graphic keys and narrative paratexts, would come to gain a sense of overview on it. Similarly, although the power and clout of a compilation such as the Dictionary of National Biography comes from its promise to provide a full survey of its titular subject matter, a reader can only access the content of that overview by immersing her/himself in reading the mini-biographies of which it is compiled. Both phases—the immersion and the overview—are crucial to the overall effect. My case studies demonstrate that the artificial elevation of the panorama is not merely the isolated, singular or escapist position of Romantic genius over lonely landscape (William Wordsworth above Tintern Abbey or Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a sea of fog), and nor is the scale and intricacy of the compilation merely a grandiose statement of British imperialism. Both were used in the nineteenth century as a means of making sense of the scale of modernity. This study examines these media, which sought to provide overview, as simultaneously ways to engage with the present, the events of history and the people who make and experience them. Immersion and overview are key terms for this study. Immersion of course originally refers to submersion in water, but the term is routinely used in media studies to indicate the illusion of presence. Grau defines it as “diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening”.8 It is not solely an emotional state, however: being immersed in a task, artisanal craft, professional field or scholarly discipline also indicates detailed knowledge of that area. The potential implicit criticism in both usages is that a practitioner immersed in their specialist area cannot see beyond it. Overview, meanwhile, literally 8  Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance, Rev. and expanded ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: London: MIT Press, 2003), 13.

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signifies a view gained by visual elevation, whether from a platform, a roof, a mountain peak or a hot air balloon. It is also routinely used metaphorically to signify comprehensive understanding; the OED definition (which dates it to 1916, in a scholarly context) includes “a broad or overall view of a subject”.9 Immersion and overview have very different temporal dimensions. Immersion always takes time, whereas the attraction of the overview is that can be surveyed in a single gaze—but this can limit its capacity to represent the passing of time. As I argue, therefore, both are needed. The nineteenth century saw a gradual shift of emphasis from the panoramic model of overview to the compilation-based model. The following chapters therefore trace the shift from a Romantic to a would-be scientific way of looking at the world. However, the narrative I trace in this book was not a binary transition. The Romantic period was no stranger to compilation. As well as the period’s many encyclopedic projects (discussed briefly at the opening of Part II), this also applied to the 360° panorama’s many spin-off variants. The “moving panorama”, a scroll-based format accompanied by a live showman, comprised a sequence of tableaux shown in succession.10 As a result, the viewer would be required to compile several images in the mind’s eye before reaching their own sense of overview. Similarly, the key to a panoramic painting flattened its components into a numbered list of labeled figures and landmarks. As Chap. 2 reveals, the reliance of panoramas on these explanatory keys required the viewer-turned-reader to switch between experiential modes, from affective immersion to mining the image for information. Further, as Clare Pettitt has explored, working-­class readers in the early nineteenth century mainly drew their understanding of current affairs from the cheap unstamped press, which was not allowed to

9  “Overview, n.”, in OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed 9 August 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/135302. 10  Although some panorama painters tried to merge these into a seamless whole, that was more feasible for panoramas of journeys or voyages than those of historical events. On the latter type, see Helen Kingstone, “Panoramas, Patriotic Voyeurism, and the ‘Indian Mutiny’”, Victorian Literature and Culture 50, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 261–94. On moving panoramas as a form, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013).

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print news.11 The “un-radical unstamped press” instead printed topical and news-parallel snippets, often with a time lag from the event itself, so a reader “had to construct his or her frame for the disarticulated pieces of story or information” they gathered and project them “towards the completion of an imagined whole”.12 Any overview generated this way existed in relation to an always-incomplete compilation. Compilations also did not necessarily disavow the panoramic model. The compilations I discuss were all aiming at plenitude. Their impulse was not only accumulative, it was also unifying. This approach, which Natasha Moore calls “the encyclopedic impulse of the Victorian age” and sees as epic in mode, relies on a faith that there is a totalizing order—as well as a narrative—behind the details.13 If not, we are left with “only the cumulative approach of the scientific method”,14 in which “the unit became merely a unit”.15 Moore associates encyclopedic “wholeness by aggregation” with the Victorian novel, but it is just as much the method of collective biography. None of the compilations examined in this study are, in Bakhtinian terms, repudiating the ideal unity of the epic (however episodic such epics end up being in practice); instead, they are continuing that genre’s “quest for wholeness”.16 This “quest for wholeness” emerged partly because several of the projects were fuelled by positivist ideals, derived from Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and his “Positive Philosophy”.17 This envisaged a future (or even current) scientific era in which all problems of knowledge could ultimately be conquered. Positivism influenced Charles Booth, mastermind of 11  Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 44. The taxes on news were only fully repealed in 1855. 12  Pettitt, 66, 19. 13  Natasha Moore, “Epic and Novel: The Encyclopedic Impulse in Victorian Poetry”, Nineteenth-Century Literature 68, no. 3 (2014): 421, 416, https://doi.org/10.1525/ ncl.2013.68.3.396. 14  Moore, 418. 15  Colin Nicholas Manlove, Literature and Reality, 1600–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 210. 16  Moore, “Epic and Novel”, 418. For Bakhtin’s distinction, see M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 38–75. 17  Comte’s founding work was translated into English (in condensed form) by Harriet Martineau as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853).

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the Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903), W. T. Stead, the founder of the compilation periodical Review of Reviews (1890–1936), and Leslie Stephen, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901).18 By no means all the compilers discussed in Part II adopted Positivist ideals: as George Levine and Bonnie Smith have diversely demonstrated, plenty of Victorian scientists who pursued zealous quests for knowledge saw their endeavors in different frameworks, including ones of Christian self-sacrifice or manly empiricism.19 For all these compilers, however, faith in the power of scientific progress contributed to the scale of their ambitions and led them to hope that their labors would produce valid and valuable overviews on their chosen subject matter.

Big Data and Distance This book therefore focuses on the ways in which people respond to excess of information—the precursor to today’s information overload and to today’s deliberate effort to gain and use “big data”. Compilers of knowledge have long expressed concerns that there is “too much to know”.20 Successive historical periods have been convinced that their era is the one dealing with an unprecedented plenitude and excess of data, and the nineteenth century, like our own, is no exception. Practitioners tend to see it as an exciting opportunity—big data is “the oil of the information economy” in the twenty-first century21—but are also faced with the challenge of how to process, organize, digest and analyze this wealth (or excess) of 18  None of these figures were such zealots as Winwood Reade, who prophesied that man would become what “the vulgar” currently “worship as God”, Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Watts & Co., 1924 [1872]), 425, 437. 19  George Lewis Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Bonnie G.  Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000). 20  See Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Christopher De Hamel, “The European Medieval Book”, in The Oxford Companion to the Book, Michael F.  Suarez and H.  R. Woudhuysen, eds., vol. 1 ([New York]: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38–53; Thomas Vranken, “Between Counterfeit Coin and Genuine Article: From Copying to Originality in Tit-Bits”, Victorian Periodicals Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 679–91. 21  Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 16.

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data, to turn it into information and thence into knowledge. As Christine Borgman puts it: “Data have no value or meaning in isolation. They can be assets or liabilities or both”.22 The Review of Reviews digest periodical and the collective biographical dictionaries Men of the Time and the Dictionary of National Biography all approached their material through successive sifting processes and tried to mitigate being overwhelmed through a four-stage technique: selection; distillation, compression, reduction and/or homogenization; aggregation; and discoverability. Each of these processes raises questions about representativeness: How can a user of the compilation be confident that the selected elements, instances or lives represent the most important bits of the whole—and is the representation “descriptive” as in a mirror, “symbolic” in “standing for” the larger whole, or mediated by acting on behalf of that whole?23 Each process also raises questions about bias (is the distiller trying to push a particular agenda or represent certain people or publications in a certain light?) and, for some observers, about longevity (how long will this particular selection or distillation be accurate, relevant or representative?). All of the projects I examine in Part II had to face these challenges. A version of information overload is expressed many times in nineteenth-­ century writing. One way it was understood at the time, which acknowledged both its vertiginous effects and exciting potential, is as what Kant termed the “mathematical sublime”.24 We can see this expressed by T. H. Huxley and George Eliot (as I have detailed elsewhere), and Caroline Levine has traced it in further realist fiction, where she calls it the “enormity effect”.25 Realist fiction often tussles with the challenge of how to represent its protagonists in relation to a much broader—and 22  Christine L.  Borgman, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 4. 23  Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 13–14; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 39–41. 24  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. J.  C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 78. 25  Helen Kingstone, “Human-Animal Elision: A Darwinian Universe in George Eliot’s Novels”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40, no. 1 (1 January 2018): 87–103, https://doi. org/10.1080/08905495.2018.1406732; Caroline Levine, “The Enormity Effect: Realist Fiction, Literary Studies, and the Refusal to Count”, Genre 50, no. 1 (April 2017): 64, 62. The OED labels as obsolete the sense of “enormity” as related to scale, along with several other senses indicating irregularity, but Levine uses it primarily to emphasize scale.

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ever-­growing—population and seeks to foreground “unhistoric” characters, though it only ever celebrates a few of these at a time.26 Levine argues that “in a moment of big data” the realist novel genre “has something to offer”, because it resists purely statistical accounts of enormity, and I would argue the same for the panoramic and compilation modes of overview.27 Levine suggests that “While tallies and calculations imply a kind of mastery, the enormity effect demands a humility and a shock […] without abdicating responsibility”.28 This also applies to the panorama form: even if it seems to offer mastery, it leads the viewer to this state only through the “shock” of immersion. Many compilations similarly produced a sense of overwhelming enormity: as Isobel Armstrong puts it, the Great Exhibition of 1851 created “a sublime of heterogeneity” and “infinite particularity”.29 Some compilations resisted this association with chaotic particularity. Dictionary of National Biography editor Sidney Lee did claim a kind of mastery of big data in his “Statistical Account” of the completed dictionary, and he certainly did not aim at producing “an ethical crisis” as Levine suggests the enormity effect should.30 However, as I will explain in Part II, even this collective biography project was not as straightforwardly instrumental either in conception or practice as Lee’s retrospective statistical survey of it suggests. How useful, therefore, is distance? Panoramic perspective’s combination of immersion and overview can be analogized as a combination of close and distant reading. For some, the only way to make sense—and use—of big data is to stand back from it. For Digital Humanities leaders such as Franco Moretti, distance is “a condition of knowledge”, and as Mario Aquilina characterizes the dicta, “big and distant is better than

26  Helen Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chapter 8; Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003). For an exception to this, see Maia Mcaleavey, “Anti-­ Individualism in the Victorian Family Chronicle”, Novel 53, no. 2 (1 August 2020): 213–34, https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8309569. 27  Levine, “The Enormity Effect”, 60, 62. 28  Levine, 62–63. 29  Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 147. 30  Levine, “The Enormity Effect”, 65.

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small and close”.31 For Levine and many other literary scholars, by contrast, fiction offers an alternative to the way that quantitative approaches seek to compress and control the multifariousness of experience. When scholars align the panorama with colonialism, imperialism and militarism’s overweening sense of mastery and aloof distantiation, they sideline a crucial aspect of its affect. This becomes clear when we compare it with the top-down “ichnographic” map or even the bird’s eye view.32 Those formats provide overview but not immersion. By contrast, as Chap. 2 shows, the panorama valuably reveals the pattern within the chaos, but also the immediacy and intimacy of the chaos within the pattern. Aggregation too has political implications. In recent consideration of the “total archive”, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage ask a persistent question: What is the link “between totality and totalitarianism”?33 In the nineteenth century the emergent and ultimately dominant political philosophy was liberalism, now being challenged in our twenty-first century both from its own extrapolation into neoliberalism and from a resurgent populism. As Nathan Hensley has emphasized, liberalism puts its faith in aggregation of units, treating its populations biopolitically as countable and commensurable.34 In a framework that sees value as emerging from “an aggregation of facts”, compilations become immediately appealing; what place does that leave for overview?35 Even utilitarian liberalism requires faith in overview through immersion, a faith that compiling examples can produce wholes that mean more than the sum of their parts. 31  Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review 1, no. 238 (February 2000): 57; Mario Aquilina, “The Work of the Literary Critic in the Age of Big Data”, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 19, no. 4 (2017 2017): 500, https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.19.4.0493. 32  On the map view, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988), 119. On bird’s eye views, see Martin Hewitt, Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832–1914 (London: Routledge, 2019). 33  Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, “The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality”, History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 5 (1 December 2018): 10. They refer back to Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 21. 34  Nathan K. Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 35  Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 159.

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While previous studies have showcased nineteenth-century faith in statistics, this study turns our attention to media that aimed to represent totality not through quantification or enumeration but through powerful metaphors of space.36 This book therefore argues for a new politics of distance, one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. The study builds on the work of Amanda Anderson, George Levine, Mary Favret, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Mark Salber Phillips and Caren Kaplan on issues of detachment and distance.37 Daston and Galison show that apparent objectivity in scientific writing is in fact always “moralized”, as I explore further in Chap. 6.38 Anderson charts how materialist, feminist and poststructuralist scholars have rejected the fallacy of objectivity, but she argues that Victorian writers were sophisticatedly conscious of the challenges of would-be detachment. Any claim to overview can easily tip over into a claim to objectivity or to being “the view from nowhere” that Thomas Nagel has shown to be a fallacy, since that nowhere is always really somewhere.39 Does a fallacy only ever do harm, or can it also be conceptually necessary and useful? This study moves away from that blame-laden discourse by restoring two key terms to the debate: “immersion” and “overview”. These are the immersion that is unavoidable when in the midst of experience and the overview that is so difficult to achieve when contemplating contemporary history. Intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge immersion as 36  Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993); Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Lawrence Goldman, Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford, New  York: Oxford University Press, 2022). 37  Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Levine, Dying to Know; Mary A.  Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018). 38  Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 225–28. 39  Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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inextricable from every perspective even when seeking to “rise above” it, but I nonetheless want to rehabilitate overview as aspiration. As I will show, it can be social, collaborative, embodied, polyvocal and gained through an immersive process. Since “immersion” and “overview” are directly visual and spatial terms, one might expect them to apply more readily to the spectacle of the Romantic panorama than to the compilation reference works of the fin de siècle. However, as I show in Chap. 6, for instance, Review of Reviews regularly used a mosaic page layout of miniaturized contents pages to offer its readers a peepshow overview on the key articles of the month, showing that spatial techniques are inherent to both models. I also use the terms figuratively to represent relationships to time, reflecting the spatial qualities of virtually all of our terms and metaphors for time.40 Karl Schlogel has argued that historians’ focus on temporality has created an inappropriate “space hostility”.41 This book therefore seeks to theorize how space and time functioned together in nineteenth-century British depictions that saw the contemporary era in historical terms. A sense of overview (whether cognitive, intellectual or emotional) relies not only on an initial immersion, but subsequently upon a certain level of distancing. Overview on the contemporary moment or era therefore relies upon treating the present as history.

Memory and the Contemporary In my previous monograph, I foregrounded the concept of the recent past that lies within living memory, arguing that we need to treat such timeframes as historical time but that their liminal status (our lack of hindsight, and the excess of potential material to digest) makes them the subject of constant renegotiation.42 In this study, I turn to focus on how such a timeframe is experienced as a contemporary era, that is, one that is still present in topical media rather than feeling conclusively past. This is the period in which we still feel immersed, rather than being able to view it from the 40  Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [1980] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 41  Kathrin Maurer, Visualizing the Past: The Power of the Image in German Historicism (Berlin  ; Boston: De Gruyter, 2013). See Karl Schlogel, In Raume Lesen Wir Die Zeit (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003). 42  Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 10.

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nominally external perspective of overview. A pair of terms coined by early twentieth-century philosopher John McTaggart for ways of looking at time, “A-series” and “B-series”, forms a useful starting point, though my study overhauls them as ultimately inadequate.43 The A-series is the immersed perspective in which we live day-to-day, which prioritizes the present and considers the past and future in relation to that (constantly shifting) present. As I see it, we use it when we count backward and measure in relation to now, for instance, when we talk about the events labeled as “9/11” as happening twenty years ago. The B-series by contrast is the perspective of overview, which sees a period of time as a self-contained sequence of events earlier and later than each other, measured by date counting in relation to 1 CE (1 AD). This is how we typically view more distant historical events (what gets colloquially referred to as “the olden days”, a past with little direct relevance to our present). Rather than considering events in terms of their relativity to us, referring to them by date puts a pin in them and marks them as static. We might expect the A-series to be relevant to people’s everyday lives in the present and the B-series to be appropriate for our narratives of past history. But what about the liminal period between these two? I question this philosophical binary because the complex and contentious process of bringing the recent past into historical focus breaks down and even nullifies this distinction. My case studies pre-emptively historicize the contemporary era, turning immersive A-series material very quickly into B-series narratives. Nineteenth-century writers were self-aware about the overlap and tension between these concepts. George Eliot brings both into view when she declares: “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning”.44 This wry comment acknowledges that time is really continuous (an A-series) but that we can only get a handle on it by viewing it in B-series mode. One such B-series model is the Enlightenment’s stadial model of historical change, which saw societies as moving through successive stages of development toward (a universalized Western standard of) civilization. I have elsewhere highlighted the ways it continued to be influential through 43  Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 15–17; John McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”, Mind 17, no. 68 (October 1908): 457–74. 44  George Eliot, Daniel Deronda [1876], ed. Terence Cave (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 7.

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the nineteenth century, but Devin Griffiths has provocatively argued that we need instead to see its nineteenth-century manifestation as a “comparative historicism”, one popularized by Scott and endorsed by Darwin and Eliot.45 This, Griffiths argues, proposed not an ascending or teleological view of temporality but a “flat epistemology” in which no culture or historical period can be definitively judged as higher than another.46 One implication of that for my argument is that it would make any B-series overview much more difficult to achieve, because (continuing the spatial metaphor) in such a flat landscape one can never reach the necessary elevated viewpoint. While Griffiths emphasizes nineteenth-century writers’ sense of being immersed in history, I turn to examine the creative and ambitious ways they used to seek overview against the odds. In practice, of course, we use the concepts of immersion and overview within social, cultural, political and emotive contexts, so Memory Studies scholarship provides a valuable supplement to the schematic A-/B-series framework. That field has valuably explored the process by which the present becomes history, but with a predominant focus so far on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so I seek to draw its insights into nineteenth-­ century studies.47 A useful concept for this study is Jan and Aleida Assmann’s delineation of collective memory into two types that split along temporal lines: “communicative memory”, the everyday, flexible, mutually owned sense of the period within living memory (which can include first-hand memories for some and mediated memories for others), and “cultural memory”, the “formalized and institutionalized” memories of a more distant past that tend to bind national/religious/ethnic groups into

45  Helen Kingstone, “The Comparative Method in ‘Shallow Time’: Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, and Francis Galton”, in Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences, ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 172–92; Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 4. 46  Griffiths, The Age of Analogy, 255. 47  Astrid Erll’s work inspirationally covers both fields. One specific further exception is Katherine Haldane Grenier and Amanda Mushal, eds., Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). However, this volume, while living up to its subtitle very well, does not engage all that closely with Memory Studies theory.

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a shared identity.48 Since these apply to the recent past within living memory and to the distant past, respectively, they provide a useful framework for my research. We are used to “cultural memory” providing a simplified, even mythical overview (such as of British or American exceptionalism, or Russian patriotic resistance to invasion, or Polish victimhood at the hands of both Germany and Russia), but what makes the nineteenth-century panoramic and compilation models notable is their attempts to offer an overview on even “communicative” living memory. A bipartite framework of communicative and cultural memory, however, is not sufficient. How do these two types of memory relate to one another? And where does “history” fit into this framework? That can be partially illuminated by another useful concept adopted into Memory Studies, Jan Vansina’s idea of the “floating gap”.49 Emerging from Vansina’s anthropological study of oral societies in Central Africa, this term identifies a notable temporal gap between the terrain of recent, communicative memory, about which a great deal is mutually known, and the remote past, which is the powerful terrain of cultural memory in the form of ritual, song and myth. The chronological limbo between these two terrains, which is constantly shifting as time passes and new generations emerge, he calls a “floating gap”.50 In oral societies this can be a very wide gap. In the nineteenth century, as I showed in Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past (2017), many historians were keen to retain that gap, curtailing their national historical narratives outside living memory. As I emphasize there, however, this gap was genre-specific: several novelists specialized in mediating that gap by writing historical novels about periods within living memory. Here, I examine multifarious nineteenth-century media in which that gap (between the time periods covered by communicative and cultural memory) becomes so much reduced that it is no longer a gap but what I would call an overlap: the floating overlap. 48  Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique, no. 65 (1995): 125–33; Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 109–18. They build on Maurice Halbwachs’ theories, developed c. 1925–44, published posthumously in 1950 as La mémoire collective, and in English in 1980. See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980). 49  Used in Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory”. 50  Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 23–24.

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The media this book examines are significant for their disregard for that bipartite divide between communicative and cultural memory: in varying proportions, they combine the two. Astrid Erll suggests that “such a scenario is not an exceptional borderline case, but is rather a recurrent characteristic of modern memory culture”, and we see it recurrently in this study.51 One might expect that short-lived media, such as panoramas of current events and ephemeral collective biographies, would serve as media of communicative memory. Similarly, one might expect that the intendedly permanent memorial panoramas built in America and continental Europe from the 1870s, and compilations designed for posterity such as museum collections and the Dictionary of National Biography, serve as media of cultural memory. However, such a binary divide would disregard important facets of panoramas: the time lag between event and execution, their long runs (often up to a year), and their extended life spans (and exacerbated time lag) on provincial tours.52 That binary would also fail to leave space for the many writers—historians, poets, novelists, proto-­ sociologists—who used panoramic perspective in works that were intended to last a long time. Thirdly, that binary would also disregard the way that many of the formalizing compilations in this book, such as Charles Booth’s huge statistical study of poverty in London, were undertaken for present and political purposes. All of these attempts to seek overview on modernity do so by turning the floating gap into a floating overlap and representing the contemporary era as history. History is the key term missing from the Assmanns’ model, but it was an indispensable concept in the nineteenth century.53 G.  W. F.  Hegel’s philosophy of history lay behind Romantic historicism and the panoramic model of overview. Hannah Arendt critiques Hegel’s approach for the way it views “the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle”.54 This imagines the panorama visitor, or the reader of Carlyle’s French Revolution, as passive bystander. Seeing the present as history can be limiting. Pettitt comments that when “politics is overwritten by

 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31.  See Pettitt, Serial Forms, 141–42. 53  Both Assmanns are primarily Egyptologists, focused on the remote past as well as having an eye to the post-war twentieth century. 54  Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 46. 51 52

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‘history’, […] the radical possibility of the ephemeral present is lost”.55 However, the immersive qualities of all the media examined in this study, and the process of immersion on the way to attempted overview, mean that spectatorship is never solely distanced and nor is it passive. The case studies examined here were navigating not only the relationship between living memory and distanced myth, but also the gradually formulating expectations and norms of a professionalizing history-­ writing.56 Even those panoramas or compilations that sought to be definitive—within this study primarily my final case study the DNB—aimed not to become cultural myths but to be accepted as methodical and empirical contributions to historiography. This study therefore traces how panoramic and compilation media navigated between the material of communicative memory on the one hand, and on the other, increasingly formalized expectations of what counted as historical representation.

Methodology and Outline of the Book My study covers the long nineteenth century, taking as its structuring start and end points the 360° panorama structure of painting invented on the eve of the French Revolution and the completion of the mammoth sixty-­ six-­volume Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) in 1901. The book’s capacious chronological and material scope is necessary to make a comparative argument concerning the way these different immersive media work to generate overview. Its broad field of vision therefore necessitates a mixed methodology. Anyone knows when they stand within a panorama painting, or pick up a volume of the DNB, that they are only looking at part of the whole at any one time, and this book similarly has to reconstruct a whole from fragments. We therefore need to bring together these two models of overview, otherwise we remain at risk of losing comparative readings of large forms whose scale pushes the limits of the monograph model. In Part I, the challenge of studying panoramas is that so few survive. Instead, we have to collate visitors’ experiences from a combination of 55  Clare Pettitt, Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 66. 56  For more on the nineteenth-century professionalization of historiography, see Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, pt. I and II.

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paratexts, individual accounts, and adverts and reviews in newspapers and periodicals. For Part II, when studying the DNB, the opposite challenge applies: we have the finished product, but its archive was lost soon after the First World War. I therefore draw on archives of surviving correspondence and contributors’ contracts to reconstruct a 3-D model of decision-­ making processes, aspirations and practical constraints. I then test these through close examination of the DNB itself, combining close reading with some of the fruits of large-scale digital distant readings. Part of the challenge of studying any Victorian attempts at overview—particularly the huge single project of the DNB—is the same kind of excessive volume of material that assailed its original creators. Such projects promise comprehensiveness, but since I analyze them here as part of a broader frame, my analysis inevitably cannot be equally comprehensive. This is where digital methods can help, both to visualize an overall picture and to be directed to its most salient details.57 Overall, this study proceeds via a case study approach, showing through comparison and cross-reference how my chosen case studies are indicative of broader trends.58 Part I opens with Chap. 2 examining how panoramas produced overview through immersion. I show how panoramas were used to represent recent historical events, and how in combination with their narrative paratexts, they sought to provide an overview on the recent past within living—or “communicative”—memory. These paintings placed the viewer in a privileged position at the center of the scene, both immersed in the moment and artificially distanced (typically elevated) from the action itself. Chapters 3 and 4 then trace how panoramic perspective percolated beyond the painted format into other media, and how writers in different genres remediated and imaginatively expanded what it could do. The histories, poetry and novel-writing I examine add a narrative dimension that extends beyond the painting’s single frozen moment to offer temporal overview. These textual fictions revel in their capacity for movement, as narratorial voices swoop over the scenes and plunge into immersive proximity; they add a cosmic scale to the elevation as they look down on events from elsewhere in the galaxy; and they 57  See Helen Kingstone, “Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis”, in preparation. 58  On case study methodology, see Lauren Berlant, “On the Case”, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 663–72.

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make the privileged overview an interactive one, as narrators lift roofs off houses and omnisciently observe the emotions of those inside. The idiosyncratic Tory radical historian Thomas Carlyle pioneered many of these techniques: in Chap. 3, I show how he used them to great effect to help him write the recent history of the French Revolution, and I compare his approach with that of conservative stalwart Archibald Alison, to demonstrate how Alison loses out by eschewing panoramic perspective. Chapter 4 moves from history-writing to fiction by Thomas Hardy, in which he used panoramic perspective to tussle with the historicity of his recent past and contemporary era. We continue the previous focus on the Napoleonic Wars, but move to the furthest reaches of living memory, focusing on Hardy’s supremely panoramic closet-drama about those wars, The Dynasts (1904–08), and comparing it to his earlier and much smallerscale representation of the same period in his novel The Trumpet-Major (1880). The affordances of panoramic perspective allow Hardy to go much further in The Dynasts by innovatively combining immersion and overview and enabling the question of historicity—“What counts as historic?”—to become the driving force of the drama. The panorama and compilation models come together in Chap. 5 as I trace the historical transition from the former to the latter. This part of my discussion demonstrates how both modes of overview could be relevant to a single medium at the mid-century, in this case photography. This new medium’s conventions were developed from those of existing media, including history-painting and the panorama. In a case study of the Crimean War (1853–1856), I examine the war photography of Roger Fenton (and compare his struggles to gain an overview of the front with those of nurse Mary Seacole), to show how photography’s characteristics and innovations were also remediated back into those longer-­ standing media. Once photography began being displayed in exhibitions and then consolidated into collections, it also came to be viewed in a very different model of overview—as forming a compilation whose value lay in its multiplicity—as well as forcing collectors and curators to revise their definitions of the artifact and the display. The final section of this chapter considers the utopian possibilities that photography evoked for some, of becoming a complete visual repository of knowledge.

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Part II turns to projects that were consciously designed as compilations. While they often comprised miniature narrative segments, their overall structure was a composite rather than a linear one. They were therefore designed to function similarly to collections of objects, in which one could extract and examine a single example from the mass, or compare several in quick succession, or use finding aids such as indexes and alphabetical order to seek an overview on the whole set. The projects discussed here were intended to give an overview on the contemporary era, but with an eye to their legacy for the future. Whereas Chaps. 3 and 4 showcase works that tackled the recent past, and in Chap. 5 the present moment, the compilation projects in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8 sought their contemporary overview in the service of the future. The first half of Chap. 6 delineates the key issues involved in big data compilations, showing how previous projects, from Enlightenment and Romantic encyclopedias to proto-sociological surveys by Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, navigated between panoramic and compilatory models of overview. I draw on Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s influential theory of changing modes of objectivity, to argue that late nineteenthcentury compilers tried to use “mechanical objectivity” but found that in practice they needed to combine that with human judgment. I also show how these compilation projects, while drawing on an equivalent of big data, undermine some of twenty-first-century big data’s assumptions about the relative significance of the whole and the parts. Unlike statistical projects either then or now, these compilations refuse to aggregate and instead demand that the reader engages with the individual mosaic pieces from which they are compiled. The second half of the chapter then turns to my first compilation case study, W.  T. Stead’s Review of Reviews (founded 1890), which sought to digest a mass of periodicals into a manageable overview. I show how Stead used innovative methods to offer his meta-periodical as a very first draft of contemporary history and to push further than previous compilers both in trying to compile photography (not fully successful) and in index form (more so). Chapter 7 demonstrates the thriving Victorian culture of ephemeral collective biography series and showcases one such series, Men of the Time (published at three-yearly intervals, 1852–99). This single-volume publication repeatedly superseded itself, stressing the previous edition’s inadequacy in order to present its successor as authoritative, in a concertina-like

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process of asserting and undermining itself. Its successive editors were highly conscious of their subjects’ mortality, and made creative responses to this challenge, but were never able to offer a definitive overview. This and Chap. 6 both show that the apparently one-off collective biography project of the Dictionary of National Biography, while unusual in its scale, was rooted in widespread models of compilation. In Chap. 8, I focus in on the practices, structures and linguistic patterns of the British Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) itself, providing a powerful case study of what happens when you try to produce definitive accounts of lives still present in living memory. I examine the process of producing the DNB, arguing that while it is now often seen as a stereotypically Victorian “monument”, its editors and contributors were far more conscious of its temporary—even “interim”—qualities and the vagaries of collaborative production.59 I then focus in on the text of the DNB itself, which (undermining any claims to monumental status) features a disproportionately large number of very recent lives. I examine how contributors represented these very proximate individuals, how they sought to attain a kind of distanced overview on those lives, and to what extent they succeeded. The book closes with a short concluding chapter (Chap. 9) that returns to the overarching questions of overview and immersion. The book is British in its focus (like the Edinburgh-invented and London-centric panorama and like the DNB that took a capacious definition of “national”), but, like both these case studies, has implications for the global reach of empire. The events depicted in Napoleonic-era panoramas were largely battles over potential or existing colonies, while the “nation” represented in the DNB is, especially for its nineteenth-century subjects, one whose outlines were those of the British Empire. When these media sought an overview on their contemporary era, part of what made that overview so hard to secure—and thus so sought-after—was that the geographical horizons of the nation could no longer be easily comprehended. The case study at the center of this book, the visual culture of the Crimean War, shows that nominally British people and art forms were

59  David Cannadine, “British Worthies”, London Review of Books, 3 December 1981, 3; H.  C. G.  Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography: Leslie Stephen Lecture, Delivered 25 October 1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6.

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heavily implicated in transcontinental and transimperial struggles.60 The writers featured in this book were conscious of this. Carlyle is known in his later work for violently rejecting any responsibility toward Caribbean former enslaved people in favor of the British industrial poor, but both he in The French Revolution and Thomas Hardy in The Dynasts question the validity of nationality as a meaningful category as they examine the trans-­ European effects of the Napoleonic Wars.61 Similarly, Stead made the front cover of Review of Reviews an image of the globe, but before long he had to capitulate to practicality, and also local interest, by establishing dedicated American and Australian editions. This book therefore argues that the ever-changing complexity of the “Empire on which the sun never sets” ultimately demanded overview from an impossibly cosmic perspective. In a twenty-first century that urgently needs to see the big picture in order to confront shared global challenges, it is essential to understand the most productive—and fallacious—ways of doing so.

60  See Sukanya Banerjee, “Transimperial”, Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 925–28. 61   See [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, Fraser’s Magazine 40 (December 1849): 670–79.

PART I

Panoramic Perspective

CHAPTER 2

Contemporary History in Panoramas

In “On the Present in Literature”, utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch invokes a snippet from Goethe: “If you want me to show you the vicinity, you must first climb to the roof”. 1 As this highlights, we need distance to view a landscape in its due proportions. But what about when that “vicinity” is temporal: How can we achieve distance from contemporary events? Here in Part I, I argue that one early nineteenth-century solution was to substitute lack of chronological distance with a constructed spatial distance, to produce an artificial overview. What people lacked in daily life they would pay to gain through man-made means. These chapters bring together the work of nineteenth-century artists and impresarios, journalists, historians and poets to examine how they used strategies of physical distance and elevation to remediate recent events into leisure culture, via that most popular contemporary visual overview: the panorama. The panorama was invented in 1787 by Edinburgh painter Robert Barker. It was different from previous large-scale paintings by being a single seamless 360° whole and by a series of clever structural elements that combined to produce an unprecedentedly immersive “reality effect”.2 The 1  J. W. Goethe, “Book of Proverbs”, The West-Eastern Divan (1814–18), qtd. Ernst Bloch, “On the Present in Literature”, in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 207. 2  Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989), 141–48.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_2

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Fig. 2.1  Robert Mitchell, “Cross-section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square” (1801), in British Library 56.i.12. (Plate 14). Digital image in the public domain, courtesy of British Library online prints collection. Shelfmark 56.i.12. (Plate 14)

viewer entered via underfloor tunnels and was then kept at an enforced distance from the canvas; the painting’s edges were concealed, giving the impression that it might continue indefinitely; and it was lit by natural light from hidden skylights (see Fig. 2.1). Since the painting was typically produced from an elevated viewpoint (the second ever panorama was literally obtained from a “climb to the roof”), the panorama also provided an overview on what it surveyed.3 The first purpose-built panorama structure was opened by Barker in 1793 at London’s Leicester Square, where it exhibited 126 different panoramas across its lifetime (it closed in 1863), and it sparked offshoots and

3  The first was a view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill; the second was a view of London from the roof of Albion Mills on the south side of the Thames.

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rivals on the Strand and in Regent’s Park.4 For a time, every metropolitan center had at least one such building, and the innovative form quickly transitioned from curious novelty to established entertainment: an 1821 panorama program describes its location as “the large new circular wooden building, George’s Square, Glasgow”, whereas just a year later, another Glasgow panorama program could describe its attraction more straightforwardly as “in the Rotunda”.5 The form also diversified into theater-­ based formats: “peristrephic” panoramas (often semi-circular series of tableaux) and scroll-based “moving panoramas” were typically accompanied by a lecture, music and/or light effects.6 Panoramas were therefore a standard part of established bourgeois leisure culture, making it essential for us to incorporate them into our understanding of nineteenth-century historical perception. This chapter examines how panoramas were used to showcase recent historical events and the kinds of overview they could offer. Various previous scholars have viewed panoramas as the culmination of the eighteenth-­ century prospect view, as a substitute for the Grand Tour and other means of travel, and as the precursor to twentieth-century cinema and twenty-­ first-­century virtual reality technology.7 However, I argue here that they need to be recognized and evaluated as part of the process of writing contemporary history in the nineteenth century. This chapter shows that the influence was reciprocal: early Victorian historians also evoked panoramic perspective to help them represent contemporary history.

4  Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “all-Embracing” View (London: Trefoil in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, 1988), 58. 5  Messrs. Marshall, Description of Messrs Marshall’s Grand Peristrephic Panorama of the Polar Regions (Leith: Printed by William Heriot, 1821), 1; Henry Aston Barker and J. Burford, eds., Description of the Panorama of Venice (Leith: Printed by William Heriot, 1822), 1. University of Glasgow Special Collections, BG33-h.4, numbers 9 and 2 of 26. The city center square, originally named for George III, is now known as “George Square”. 6  Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion. 7  John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1986); Dietrich Neumann, “Instead of the Grand Tour: Travel Replacements in the Nineteenth Century”, Perspecta, 41 (2008), 47–53; Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. by Gloria Custance, Rev. and expanded ed. (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2003); Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine  : Cinema, Museums and the History of the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

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I begin by demonstrating how prevalently panoramas were used to represent recent historical events (particularly military ones), and how pervasively topical panoramas were, even when their nominal subject matter might be landscape rather than action. They challenged the norms of history painting, as their structural lack of foreground meant that viewers’ attention was dispersed across a widely populated middle ground, provocatively decentring ideas of heroic agency. Their biggest challenge in representing history lies in only showing a single frozen moment. Scroll-­ based “moving panoramas” could narrate change more easily but did not offer the same elevated overview. I show how integrally circular panoramas therefore relied on their paratexts—the programs sold to accompany visitors’ experience—to add the necessary narrative dimension to their historical overview. Equally significantly, as I argue in the chapter’s final section, panoramic overview could only be achieved via immersion in the painting’s details and experiential dimension. Previous scholars have tended to conceptualize panoramas along one or other of what I see schematically as two axes. One of these axes evaluates whether the panorama is oppressive or liberating, and another evaluates it as generating either immersion or overview. I would argue that neither of these axes is by itself sufficient: analyzing the panorama only in these terms has led ironically to blinkered views of this medium. Instead, in my interpretation these two axes intersect (see Fig. 2.2). By superimposing them in this way, we can see that different scholars have implicitly argued for the panorama as lying respectively in each of the resultant four quadrants. Debates about whether the panorama is oppressive or liberating fall into two strands, one of which has focused on panoramas’ form and another on their content (we ideally need a three-dimensional diagram). Both Gillen D’Arcy Wood and Tim Barringer view the panorama form as democratic in its appeal to a broad bourgeoisie.8 By contrast, the Foucauldian view—taken up by scholars from Stephan Oettermann and Bernard Comment to Tony Bennett and Jonathan Crary—sees panoramas as instruments of state surveillance and regulation, aligned with the

8  Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Trumpener and Barringer, On the Viewing Platform.

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Fig. 2.2  Panoramas scholarship has typically plotted the form on one of these two axes. Diagram author’s own

panopticon in turning a populace into an acquiescent citizenry.9 However, as Barringer points out, this “mistakes, even inverts, the panorama’s logic”, because if anything the panorama visitor is placed in the position not of the convict in the cell but the “all-seeing and empowered” central prison guard.10 9  Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, 1st ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 1995); Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Panorama, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion, 1999). Crary left the panorama out of his book completely. He attended to it in a later article, but even there he views the painting’s subject matter as “a contemporary news item” rather than as recent history. See Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Grey Room, 9, 2002, 7–25. This article has since been reprinted (in slightly revised form) in Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century”, in On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen, ed. Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 107–19. 10  Tim Barringer, “The World for a Shilling: The Early Panorama as Global Landscape”, in On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama Between Canvas and Screen, ed. Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 85.

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The other weakness of that approach is its evocation of a singular “observer”; real and variable observers are scarcely attended to. In response, W. J. T. Mitchell argued against this technological determinism and the distrust of popular images that arguably lies behind it and called for scholars to try to understand how viewers experienced the nineteenth century’s new visual media.11 By drawing on reception material of various kinds (diaries, letters and professional reviews), as well as the more extended responses by historians and poets, I aim to contribute to that effort. I show how the panorama could be liberating in a different sense: a cognitive and conceptual rather than directly political sense—though it could certainly have political implications—that enabled writers to gain sufficient imagined distance from contemporary history in order to write about it. In the New Historicist turn from which much analysis of the form has emerged, panoramas’ content has generally been read as reinforcing ideological hegemony: painters routinely celebrated dominant nationalisms and were complicit in the colonial gaze. In the past decade, however, scholars including Denise Blake Oleksijczuk and Joshua Swidzinski have argued that the panorama (especially the early panorama of the 1790s) could be received and interpreted as potentially subversive.12 Jason Pearl takes a refreshing approach to this question, suggesting that panoramic perspective is not “inherently liberatory” and that “aerial observation elucidates only through abstraction”, but showing that in textual form it can nonetheless serve unexpected “aesthetic purposes unaligned with” colonialism or militarism.13 My prior work on panoramas of the Indian Uprising shows how viewers could be self-aware about their own reflexively jingoistic responses.14 I return to this question across Part I to show how 11  W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory : Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 20. For distrust of popular images, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 12   Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Joshua Swidzinski, “Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London”, The Eighteenth Century, 57.3 (2016), 283–301. 13  Jason Pearl, “The View from Above: Satiric Distance and the Advent of Ballooning in Britain”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 3 (March 23, 2018): 283, https://doi. org/10.1353/ecs.2018.0000; Jason Pearl, “Aerostatic Bodies and the View from Above in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 48, no. 1 (2019): 133, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2019.0009. 14  Kingstone, “Panoramas, Patriotic Voyeurism, and the ‘Indian Mutiny’”.

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­ istorians and poets adopted and expanded upon panoramic perspective h to make sense of their contemporary era. Panorama painters from Robert Barker onward advertised their creations as immersive, an illusion of presence. Those who view the panorama as the precursor of Virtual and Augmented Reality view it primarily in these terms.15 Those who celebrate the panorama’s capacity to grant overview give it a role with high status in Western thought: Martin Jay characterizes Cartesian perspective, using panoramic language, as a “high altitude thinking” that creates “an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject entirely outside of the world it claims to know only from afar”.16 What both these antithetical positions miss, however, is that the form’s power lies in the viewer’s combination of apparent presence with their privileged central position. The visitor is not “disembodied” and does not sit “outside” of the world they see. As I show, the missing element in much previous criticism of panoramas has been the passing of time.

Panoramas of Contemporary History A core component of the panorama’s role was to depict contemporary history, typically “the recent past still alive in collective memory”17 This was primarily military: the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were central to panoramas’ initial success, and the form had a second boom during the Crimean War.18 Panorama entrepreneurs regularly drew from the sketches of eyewitnesses, and Henry Aston Barker (son of inventor Robert) took things a step further by doing his own reconnaissance for new panoramas, visiting Napoleon on Elba and rushing to the Waterloo battlefield to interview officers.19 A program to a panorama of the “Bombardment of Algiers” (1819), for example, announces that it was  Grau, Virtual Art; Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine.  Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press for Dia Art Foundation, 1988), 10. 17  Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 75. 18  On panoramas and Napoleonic Wars, see Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760–1860, 100; Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 176; Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 75. On Crimean revival, see Ulrich Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 2001). 19  Oettermann, The Panorama : History of a Mass Medium, 110–11. 15 16

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“painted under the Direction of Capt. Sir J.  Brisbane, From Drawings made on the Spot by eminent Naval Officers”, acknowledging a combination of artistic skill and eyewitness sources.20 As with the post-Waterloo touring displays of Napoleon’s abandoned carriage and other possessions, an important selling point was the veracity of the material.21 Panoramas were a radically re-oriented and ephemeral form of history painting, though one whose status was not as secure. Among artistic genres, history painting had held the highest status through the eighteenth century, reaching its apotheosis in work by Benjamin West, Jean-­ Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that depicted scenes from ancient history and from their own Age of Revolutions in similarly heroic style. Panorama inventor Robert Barker’s patent presented his innovation as an “improvement in painting”, seeking to align it with high art.22 Eminent painters including West and Sir Joshua Reynolds endorsed Barker’s skill, and Royal Academy landscape and history painters made their work increasingly panoramic.23 However, before long Barker was forced to align his invention more closely with other entertainment media: he initially set the admission price at 2s. 6d. (the norm for fine art exhibitions), but subsequently lowered it to a shilling.24 Panorama painters’ claims to artistic genius waned as their form became a mass phenomenon, and in the 1830s the Royal Academy decided to bar panorama and diorama painters from membership of their institution25; eventually “the term panorama painter was an expression of disdain”.26 Even then, the forms sometimes overlapped. The historical murals commissioned in 1842–43 20  “Messrs. Marshall’s Grand Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Bombardment of Algiers” (Hull: printed by R.  Wells & Co., 1819), in University of Glasgow Special Collections, BG33-h.4, 6 of 26. 21  Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo”, Representations, 63, 2000, 9–37. 22  [Robert Barker], Edinburgh Evening Courant, December 29, 1787. See also Swidzinski, “Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London”, 288. 23  Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 48; Ann Bermingham, “Landscape-O-Rama: The Exhibition Landscape at Somerset House and the Rise of Popular Landscape Entertainments”, in Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, ed. David H.  Solkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 134, 138, 140. 24  Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 51–52. 25  Oettermann, The Panorama : History of a Mass Medium, 187. 26  Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century”, 2002, 18. Italics in original.

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for the new Palace of Westminster were required to be panoramic in scale (the competition regulations required images 10–15 feet across, with figures at least life-size), and one of the competition’s winners was Henry Selous, the chief collaborator of Robert Barker’s successor Robert Burford.27 The eventual murals included recent historical events, such as Daniel Maclise’s depictions of the death of Nelson and the meeting of generals Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo.28 These murals shared with the panorama form an insistence on accuracy to eyewitness material and had what Clare Willsdon describes as “panoramic shallow foregrounds filled with human incident”.29 However, the very monumental and permanent intention of these murals reminds us of how consciously and intentionally ephemeral—and thus how distinctive—was the contemporary-historical panorama. Panorama painters incorporated everyday or domestic detail more easily and willingly than history painters. Where history paintings were “wedded to allegory”, panoramas focused on historicized particulars; where history painting represented the remote classical past, panoramas focused on the immediate national past; and where history painting was aimed at the elite, panorama proprietors were delighted to gain upper-class patrons but made their living from middle- and upper working-class leisure activity.30 Panoramas thus led the way toward historical genre painting, a mid-­ nineteenth-­century hybrid that combined historical subject matter with domestic focus and depicted localized or private moments: the response to the news from Waterloo (David Wilkie); Oliver Cromwell gazing into the coffin of Charles I (Paul Delaroche); Lady Jane Grey swooning just before her execution (Richard Parkes Bonington).31 We can therefore see panoramas as continuing history painting’s grand representation of historic 27  Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (London: Routledge, 2014), 25. 28  Clare A.  P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain, 1840–1940: Image and Meaning, Clarendon Studies in the History of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34. 29  T.  J. Gullick, A Descriptive Handbook for National Pictures in Westminster Palace (London: Bradbury, Evans, & Co., 1865), 32; Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain, 1840–1940, 56. 30  Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2011), 90. 31  David H.  Solkin, Painting out of the Ordinary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 39; Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 149.

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events, but preparing the ground for the development of historical genre painting in the subsequent decades. The most fundamental difference between panoramas and history paintings (of either variety) was a formal one. Panoramas’ format and composition intrinsically drew historical representation away from singular heroes and toward the representation of groups. History painting generally centered on a few prominent individuals: allegorical, classical or national figures struggling with a dilemma, acting upon a conviction or dying (as in Benjamin West’s 1770 The Death of General Wolfe). In this, they echoed a long-standing principle of religious painting: even in diverse and elaborate schemes of church frescoes, the church’s architectural structure ultimately draws the eye to a central figure of Christ. By contrast, panoramas’ 360° shape means that they have no single focal point. The foreground was completely absent from early nineteenth-century panoramas; in its late-century revival, a “false terrain” between viewing platform and canvas replaced what would otherwise have been the foreground.32 Panoramas also typically feature a high horizon—generally on a level with the viewer’s eyeline—offering a large space of middle ground.33 This distorts and empties out the immediate space and makes panoramas ill-suited to depict the central focal point or predominant foreground of history painting. No single individual represented on the panoramic canvas— however heroic—can take up more than a fraction of one part of the view. Even when a commanding General is labeled as number 1 on the key to a circular panorama, there will be times in a visitor’s perusal when they have their back to that commander and might become absorbed instead in the struggles of a wounded soldier, a group of female onlookers or even the sufferings of the enemy. This takes us far from the Foucauldian panopticon and instead makes the panorama a dangerously democratic form. Some surviving panorama programs suggest that their painters and proprietors had mixed feelings about this spread of agency. In the program to Barker’s 1816 Panorama of Waterloo (which featured a striking circular engraving, Fig. 2.3), the Duke of Wellington is listed as number 1, and is portrayed on horseback and masterfully brandishing a stick, toward the front of the image and at what Philip Shaw terms “the apex of a 32  “False terrain” was first created by French artist Charles Langlois in 1830 and introduced to Britain in 1881. See Grau, Virtual Art, 59; Hyde, Panoramania!, 174. 33  Lee Parry, “Landscape Theatre in America’, Art in America 59 (Dec 1971)”, Art in America, 52–61, 59 (December 1971): 54.

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Fig. 2.3  Key plate from Description of the Defeat of the French Army, in Front of Waterloo, on the 18th of June, 1815; Now Exhibiting in Barker’s Panorama, Strand, near Surry Street [sic] (London: J. Adlard, 1816). Reproduced by permission of University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections

perspectival cone”.34 On the other hand, he is no larger than many other figures in the painting, and it is entirely possible for a visitor to turn their back on him completely. If you do, you first find yourself gazing toward 34  Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 87.

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no. 7, the similarly iconic retreating figures of “Bonaparte and his Staff” who “are represented leaving the Field”.35 In between are multiple other clusters and serried ranks of military figures, most of whom are only named by their commanders (e.g. “6. The 10th Hussars; Part of Sir H. Vivian’s Brigade”) but who nonetheless take up substantial sections of the canvas. Two decades later, the surviving program to an 1833 panorama by Robert Burford of the previous year’s Siege of Antwerp similarly includes a simplified engraving.36 The key to this engraving lists a mixture of places, military groupings and individuals. All the named individuals are generals and aristocratic leaders (“20 Genl. Neigre // 21 Genl. Haxo // 22 Marshal Gerard & his Aide de Camp // 23 Duke of Orleans // 24 Duke of Nemours”), but this small cluster of commanders forms a very minor part of the visual scene, and larger sections of the canvas are given over to “53 Fourth D° [Division]” and other divisions of the army. Without the original full-scale canvases of either panorama, we cannot know how individuated those serried ranks were, but they would presumably have enabled visitors to superimpose the images of soldiers they knew. Even though the massed ranks of the army are not given much prominence in this panorama’s key, it does not mean that visitors spent any less time staring at them, or imagining themselves in those unfortunate soldiers’ place. There might be notable variation between a component’s size in the painting, the description of it in the program, and its emotive significance. Not all historical panoramas depicted specific named events. The mid-­ century saw a distinctly hybrid approach that I would term topical landscape. Panoramas have often been viewed in binary terms as showing either historical battles or landscapes.37 But while Richard Altick suggested that panoramas are “more topographical than topical”, the paintings always contained figures, however small: panoramas of distant lands 35  Thomas Barker ? and Richard R. Reinagle ?, Description of the Defeat of the French Army, in Front of Waterloo, on the 18th of June, 1815; Now Exhibiting in Barker’s Panorama, Strand, near Surry Street (London: J. Adlard, 1816). 36  On the shift from one mode to the other, see Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 128–31. 37  For example, Dietrich Neumann suggests that early-nineteenth-century panoramas mostly presented “faraway lands”, before “battle scenes” predominated in later decades, something that comprehensive lists of panoramas clearly refute. Neumann, “Instead of the Grand Tour”, 48. See lists of panoramas in Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism; Laurie Garrison, ed., Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts, vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), xlv–xlx.

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fulfilled ethnographic and colonialist functions.38 Moreover, their representations of place and of past were not necessarily separate. While panorama proprietors might advertise their displays simply as scenic images, no panorama of Paris in 1848—the Year of Revolutions—could deny its topicality. Similarly, panoramas of Kabul during the Afghan Wars of the early 1840s, or of New Zealand during the Land Wars that had broken out in 1845, could offer implicit historical commentaries on their geographical and ethnographic subject matter.39 As Alison Byerly acknowledges, even “scenic” panoramas “would make every effort to be au courant”.40 Panoramas could approach the issue of topical landscape in two ways: painters could make use of existing sketches of a location to capitalize on a sudden ferment of interest in that place and present their painting as an illustration of those events or at least their location. Alternatively, they could make oblique commentary on contentious current events by claiming to represent the location rather than the events themselves. Pettitt has demonstrated how the unstamped press was obliged to do this in the 1820s and 1830s, when they were forbidden to “report” news and instead found ways to “reflect” it via previous iterations of events.41 Both such strategies might have motivated the 1848 panorama of the City of Paris, taken from the Place de la Concorde, painted by Robert Burford and Henry Selous and displayed at Leicester Square in that Year of Revolutions (Fig. 2.4). Since the panorama opened on 26 May 1848 and the revolution had broken out in late February, it is likely that the painting was produced from sketches made before those events or even with revolutionary crowds added on to an existing canvas. This may be one reason why bricks-and-mortar landmarks, rather than scenes of action, dominate the canvas. All but one of the forty-eight items in the numbered key refer 38  Altick, Shows of London, 178. On the panorama’s ethnographic and colonialist function, see Nigel Leask, “Wandering through Eblis: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism”, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J.  Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 164–88; Daniel E. White, From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–1835 (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 39  This could produce heated reactions: see Kingstone, “Panoramas, Patriotic Voyeurism, and the ‘Indian Mutiny.’” 40  Alison Byerly, Are We There yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 36–37. 41  Pettitt, Serial Forms, 44. She traces how serial eruptions of Vesuvius were represented in print and show culture through previous such eruptions, most famously that of 79 A.D. (see 152–56).

Fig. 2.4  Key to Burford and Selous, panorama of The City of Paris, taken from the Place de la Concorde (1848), in BLRB.23.a.31854 (British Library). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library

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to features of the built environment (“1. Guard House. 2. Champs Elysées. 3. House formerly occupied by the Duke of Wellington. 4. Montmartre”). Only a single item in the key, no. 27, acknowledges the “Procession with a Tree of Liberty”. However, that procession dominates one half of the picture. In the distance on the other side of the Seine is an episode that stays small in visual terms (and is not even mentioned in the key) but probably loomed large in the consciousnesses of the panorama’s visitors. As the program’s text describes it, “On the steps of the National Assembly is depicted the Provisional Government, proclaiming, on the 4th of May— ‘France a Republic,’ to the countless masses below, on the quays and on the bridge”.42 This serves as a further reminder that spatial size and iconographic significance did not necessarily equate in panoramas. The program’s text itself, however, refrains from passing judgment on this monumental proclamation. It deals with the painting’s topicality by declaring that “The important events of the three days of February, 1848, are so recent, and so generally known, that they do not require even a passing notice here”.43 This excuses Burford and team from taking any potentially controversial position on those events. As Garrison puts it, “the risk of alienating potential patrons was too great”.44 Panorama proprietors evidently expected that the events they depicted would be familiar to their audiences. The excuse Burford used in 1848 in relation to Paris was clearly a regular one and is also visible in an 1833 panorama of the previous year’s “Siege of Antwerp”. Here the program opens: “The various political events which led to the important and interesting siege of the citadel of Antwerp, are too well known to need mention”.45 Such programs are explicitly ephemera, aimed at contemporaries rather than at posterity. However, while Oettermann sees the ­panorama as “a forerunner of the tabloid press”, and Altick sees it as both 42  [Robert Burford], Description of a View of the City of Paris, Taken from the Place de La Concorde, Now Exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square (London: Geo. Nichols, 1848). Reproduced in Sibylle Erle et al., eds., Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts. Volume 3: Stable Panoramas in Britain, Part 3, vol. 3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 7. 43  [Burford], View of the City of Paris, 6. Reproduced in Erle et al., Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts. Volume 3: Stable Panoramas in Britain, Part 3, 3:9. 44   Laurie Garrison, “Introduction to Stable Panoramas in Britain, 1794–1881”, in Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts, ed. Laurie Garrison, vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), lxi. 45  Robert Burford, Siege of Antwerp, with Part of the City, and Surrounding Country, 1833, 3. University of Glasgow Special Collections, BG33-h.4, 7 of 26.

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“pictorial journalism” and “instant-history painting”, these equivalences are overly simplistic.46 They were not instantaneous or momentary: as Clare Pettitt valuably emphasizes, there was a “time lag” involved, because they took months to produce and were often then displayed for several years across multiple sites, before sometimes having sections reused or sold off.47 However, while Pettitt argues that this time lag meant that “the events depicted were already teetering on the brink between memory and ‘history’”,48 those events had typically almost universally taken place within the previous few years and almost universally within living memory (although the Battle of Waterloo was revived over an extended time period). Panoramas therefore acted as a third term that mediated between short-term news and long-term historical narrative.49 The close interplay between visual images (such as panoramas) and narrative was central to Walter Benjamin’s reading of the nineteenth century, and he emphasized the significance of both in nineteenth-century approaches to history-making. In his formulation, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.— Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.50

Benjamin draws a valuable distinction between the continuous flow of time (we might refer to this as an A-series) and history emerging as a separate entity (a B-series) that we can look back on from a distance. As Derek 46  Altick, The Shows of London, 136; Oettermann, The Panorama  : History of a Mass Medium, 110. 47  Pettitt, Serial Forms, 206, 141; John Plunkett and Joe Kember, Picture Going: Popular Visual Shows 1820–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 48  Pettitt, Serial Forms, 171. 49  The 360° panorama (now sometimes termed the “cyclorama”) had a revival in continental Europe after the Franco-Prussian War and in the USA after the Civil War. These were much larger and intended for permanency. We might see 1790s–1860s panoramas (those discussed here) as concerned primarily with what Jan Assmann calls “communicative memory”, while those latter contributed to monolithic “Cultural memory”. See Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, 126. On these two types of panoramas, see Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine, 49. 50  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press, 1999), 462. Convolute N2a,3.

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Sayer describes Benjamin’s conception of this dialectic, “it is only by being made newly present as image that the past becomes history at all”.51 We can thus see images of recently past events in panorama form as being crucial to people’s reconception of those events as historical. However, there are two ways in which this chapter seeks to move beyond Benjamin’s formulation. His claim that “genuine images” comprise “language” is belied by the complex image-text relationship of media such as the panorama. A recent article by Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz puts the opposite case, arguing for us to see “visual history” as its own genre. They emphasize how West’s Death of General Wolfe substituted spatial distance for temporal distance by “setting history far away rather than […] long ago”, which “elevated the recent past into ‘instant history’”.52 Both of these accounts prioritize one medium or another— language or painting—whereas, as I delineate in the next section, panoramas recreated the past visually but also glossed how viewers should read it. Secondly, while Benjamin valuably rejects a smooth model of “continuous […] progression” to embrace a dialectics, the process of Hegelian synthesis into history remains mysterious. It is productive here to draw on a Memory Studies framework, specifically Jan Assmann’s delineation of collective memory into two phases, the “communicative” and “cultural” (as glossed in Chap. 1).53 Typically, communicative memory is the everyday material of the recent past, whereas cultural memory is “characterized by its distance from the everyday” both in practical and in temporal senses, being the site of commemorative or ritualistic myth-­making.54 Assmann incorporates into this framework Jan Vansina’s concept of the “floating gap”, a period of time—shifting in line with the passing of time—that lies between communicative and cultural memory and separates the respective material of each. However, as articulated in Chap. 1, this is not the case for the media examined in this book. Quite the opposite: their value lies in how they turn the former into the latter and negotiate both types of representation at once. Cultural memory, with its affinity to myth, serves group identity. As we will see in the final section of the chapter, panoramas contributed to 51  Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462. 52  Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa R.  Schwartz, “Visual History: The Past in Pictures”, Representations 145, no. 1 (2019): 3, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2019.145.1.1. 53  Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, 126, 129. 54  Assmann, 129.

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cultural memory (championing the cause of warmongering Napoleonicera Britain against its foes), but simultaneously served as sites for communicative memory, enabling discussions and disagreements among visitors. Further, in offering viewers a chance to codify their sense of the historical meaning of events, they also helped to re-conceptualize news as history. As I show in the next chapter, a figurative form of panoramic perspective was also adopted by historians to help them mediate recent events from communicative memory into written historical form.

Narrative Through Paratexts The main limitation on panorama’s capacity to depict contemporary history comes from the fact that it typically represents only a “single moment” or “slice of time”.55 Unlike the historical incidents they so often represented, which were by nature sequential, the paintings themselves could not straightforwardly represent change. Although several scholars have suggested that some panoramas showed sequential tableaux or vignettes in one image (as did medieval frescoes or the Bayeux Tapestry),56 the programs of the 360° panoramas routinely insisted that they represented one specific moment. The panorama was a reality illusion, so it had to put the viewer into the same temporality as the event. Panoramas relied on other supplementary media to situate that moment within a broader timeframe and convey their desired historical narratives. As other scholars have shown for other national contexts, the panorama “was not an autonomous object”: it was integrally reliant on text for viewers to make sense of it, and to gain that singular overview, by compressing “views that precisely cannot be taken in at a glance into views that can”.57 55  Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past : Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-­ Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 59; Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 74. 56  Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-­ Century England (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 61; William H.  Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 44; Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine, 44. 57  Vance Byrd, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture (London; Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 15; Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, “Panorama, Glasshouse, Museum: Alexander von Humboldt, Franz Boas, Gustaf Kolthoff”, in On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen, ed. Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 157.

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(By contrast, as I show in subsequent chapters, literary writers’ freedom to embed panoramic visual surveys within narratives gave them greater latitude in their usage.) Visitors to early 360° panorama paintings were issued with circular schematic keys to the main landmarks and figures in the picture and in later decades were sold extensive programs that gave the visitor an engraving of the image (now flattened into two rectangular halves), a textual guided tour and history of the events depicted. We therefore need to analyze panorama paintings in tandem with these supplementary paratexts and see them as multimedia rather than solely visual phenomena. The most visible multimedia panoramas are the theater-based spin-­ offs—“peristrephic” and “moving” panoramas—that developed out of the original 360° form. Queen Victoria visited at least six of this latter type (as well as at least four circular ones)58; Jane and Thomas Carlyle’s letters mention panorama visits of both types, and Thomas Carlyle relates visiting a moving panorama of the Nile in 1850 at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, after a dinner with Darwin: what he describes as “a small, quite tolerable adventure”.59 These moving panoramas ultimately became more prolific than their 360° counterparts because they were easier to transport, and so were more routinely taken on tour.60 They also had a different structure: as John Plunkett puts it, “they were ‘shows’ rather than ‘showings’, a

58  Bodleian Libraries, Royal Archives, and ProQuest, “Queen Victoria’s Journals” http:// www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do [accessed 10 July 2019]. See especially her entries for Monday 30 December 1833 and Monday 26 April 1852. She also used the term “panorama” nine further times to refer to real-life panoramic vistas. 59  Thomas Carlyle, “Thomas Carlyle to Lady Ashburton, 14 March 1850”, The Carlyle Letters Online http://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/clo/content/vol25/#lt-18500314-­ TC-­LA-01 [accessed 3 January 2019]. An earlier (1822) letter from Jane to Thomas describes a London morning including “shopping, making calls, running after [the celebrated preacher] Dr. Chalmers, walking to Slateford, and seeing the [circular] Panorama of Naples, (which, by the way, if you have not seen you ought to see)”. In this account, visiting a panorama becomes commensurate with social engagements and consumer activities. Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders et al., vol. 2 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1970), 113–15. Also available at Jane Welsh Carlyle, “Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, 25 [?] May 1822”, The Carlyle Letters Online http://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/ clo/content/vol2/#lt-18220525-JBW-TC-01 [accessed 3 January 2019]. 60  Rockett and Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909; Grau, Virtual Art, 68. Circular panoramas deployed portable rotundas (invented by Johann Michael Sattler) to go on tour, especially after 1830 when more standardized sizing began to be used.

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performance rather than an exhibition”.61 One 1837 peristrephic panorama in Glasgow advertised its “day exhibitions precisely at 12 and 2 o’clock” and in the evening “at half past 7 and 9”.62 These shows could be placed in a shared theatrical tradition with pantomimes and later burlesques, which similarly delighted in topical references and commentary on recent events.63 These other variants upon panoramas were generally watched in theater-style settings, and as Erkki Huhtamo has emphasized, they were intrinsically multimedia, prioritizing “narration and combinations of different means of expression”.64 That was also true, however, for circular panoramas. Although the very earliest panoramas were equipped only with simple pictorial keys, this shifted within their first decade to increasingly extensive and narrative programs. The single moment presented by the panorama therefore was part of a more complex set of intertwined temporalities involved in the experience of a panorama visit. Jonathan Potter has probed this particularly effectively. He argues that we need to take into account at least three temporalities when we think about visitor experiences of panoramas: the moment represented in the painting, the narrative of the paratexts and the visitor’s own “personal narrative” constructed from their “interactions with the painting”, the memories this prompts and ideas generated as a result, including later on. This produces what he calls a “nested structure” of resulting temporalities, all of which contribute to the panorama’s effect.65 61  John Plunkett, “Moving Panoramas c. 1800 to 1840: The Spaces of Nineteenth-Century Picture-Going”, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 17 (October 22, 2013): 16, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.674. 62  Frederick Catherwood ?, Description of the Highly Interesting Peristrephic Panorama of the City of Jerusalem, with the Surrounding Country; and the City of New York: Now Exhibiting at Monteith Rooms, Buchanan Street, Glasgow (Edinburgh: Printed by M.W. Reid, 1837), 1. University of Glasgow Special Collections, BG33-h.4, 5 of 26. 63  For instance, Robert B. Brough’s burlesque The Iliad; or, The Siege of Troy: A Burlesque in One Act (Lyceum Theatre, December 1858) mentioned the bombardment of Algiers whose panoramic depiction I will discuss later in this chapter. See Rachel Bryant Davies, Victorian Epic Burlesques: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Entertainments after Homer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Rachel Bryant Davies, Troy, Carthage and the Victorians (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 229; Anastasia Bakogianni and Valerie M. Hope, War as Spectacle: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Display of Armed Conflict (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 262–63. 64  Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 8. 65  Jonathan Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 28–29.

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The temporality most directly co-dependent with that of the painting was that of the programs. Their most basic function was to set the scene, which involved specifying for the viewer the place and time in which they should hopefully feel immersed. The program of an 1816 panorama showing the “Defeat of the French Army … at Waterloo” (on display at the Strand) tells us: “The time represented in the painting is about eight o’clock in the evening, when the British and their Allies, having finally repulsed all the attacks of the French, are attacking and routing them in their own position”.66 Almost thirty years later, another description of a “Guide to the Model of the Battle of Waterloo” (c. 1844) similarly declares that it shows the situation at “1/4 past 7 p.m.” and explains that “the time chosen is that in which Napoleon made his last great struggle for victory; and which may be truly termed the crisis of the battle, for on the success or failure of this effort depended the fate of the Emperor of the French, and the destinies of Europe”.67 This is one sense in which panoramas and their variants echo history paintings, which similarly were “expected to present viewers with a ‘pregnant moment’ of significant action”.68 The two examples here, however, show that even regarding an event as celebrated as the Battle of Waterloo, there was no exact consensus about when the most significant moment of any historical episode might be. This expectation that a historical image would show a single freeze-­ frame from the action evidently pre-dated photography, and it also continued after its initial invention: the Morning Chronicle’s account of the 1841 panorama of Acre (that we examined in the previous chapter) buys into the same construct. It comments disingenuously on the painted image: “What a pity that at this particular moment the Turk and the Austrian, Walker and Bandeira, should open their broadsides together! The confounded smoke shuts out the view of Mount Carmel”.69 The journalist writes as if the scene s/he is viewing is really happening, pre-empting the rules of a photograph whose details unfortunately could not be changed. 66  Barker ? and Reinagle ?, Defeat of the French Army, in Front of Waterloo. University of Glasgow Special Collections, RQ 1770/134. 67  William Siborne ?, Guide to the Model of the Battle of Waterloo (n.p., 1844), 1. University of Glasgow Special Collections, BG33-h.4, 10 of 26. The Guide names no author, but advertises and draws heavily from a history of the conflict by Siborne, in press at the time of the model’s display. 68  Solkin, Painting out of the Ordinary, 39. 69  “BURFORD’S PANORAMA of the BOMBARDMENT of ST. JEAN D’ACRE”, The Morning Chronicle, January 30, 1841.

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These repeated examples suggest that notions of single-moment freeze-­ frame images were present in the cultural imaginary even before the invention and certainly before the popularization of photography. These programs thus justify the panorama’s single moment as being the most significant or dramatic—but they also read as implicit apologies for not being able to show more than that one moment. As Scott Wilcox points out, “Unfortunately many of the devices employed [by panoramas] … aggravated the problem of the absence of movement. As soon as one introduced figures or animals, one created an expectation of movement, and as foreground groups grew in prominence, the arrested motion of these groups could only become more obvious”.70 That was something that the peristrephic and moving variants tried to ameliorate, but even there they tended to show geographical movement (e.g. along a river) rather than temporal change.71 Maurice Samuels emphasizes the panorama form’s “inability […] to portray history as process, as movement (or as dialectic)”, suggesting that it thus “rob[s] history of its narrative force”.72 It was often therefore up to the panoramas’ paratexts to inject some sense of temporal change and narrative into the image. Robert Barker tried one strategy in an early panorama, the 1796 depiction of Lord Howe’s naval victory. This managed to show two timeframes despite nominally depicting just one moment. As Oleksijczuk delineates, the panorama was entitled “Position of the British and French Fleets, about Nine a.m. on the First of June, 1794”, but the painting actually depicted a scene “correctly taken at one o’clock, p.m. … that being the First Opportunity of distinguishing the Two Fleets, when the Smoak [sic] had cleared away, and the French Fleet were sheering off”.73 The accompanying pictorial key also provided a “naval strategy map” of their 9 a.m. positions, enabling the painting to align a little more closely with its advertised title.74 This was 70  Scott Wilcox, “Unlimiting the Bounds of Paintings”, in Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “all-Embracing” View, by Ralph Hyde (London: Trefoil in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, 1988), 32. See also Evelyn J. Fruitema and Paul A. Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon (The Hague: Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Mesdag Panorama, 1981), 33. 71  Erkki Huhtamo, “Penetrating the Peristrephic: An Unwritten Chapter in the History of the Panorama”, Early Popular Visual Culture, 6.3 (2008), 219–38. 72  Samuels, The Spectacular Past, 59. 73  Robert Barker, Position of the British and French Fleets, about Nine a.m. on the First of June, 1794, 1796, engraved key, 15.2 × 11.4 inches, 1796, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reproduced in Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 146. 74  Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 145.

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extremely unusual in referencing one time while showing another, and the sleight of hand involved to indicate both suggests how other panorama creators might similarly have yearned to indicate temporal change. The most common temporal perspective used in panorama programs is the present tense of the tour guide. In terms of Michel de Certeau’s subsequent theorization, panorama proprietors typically evoke an “itinerary” rather than a “map”, encouraging visitors to believe themselves moving through the landscape rather than merely gazing down upon it.75 A panorama program of Naples from 1821 opens by telling us that “The view represented by the Panorama was taken from the water”, but then shifts into the present tense to talk us through the picture’s landmarks.76 Though circular panoramas did not typically have the benefit of the moving panorama’s attendant lecturer, they evoked such a tour guide in textual form. This became a regular practice in guidebooks to various media, as Anders Ekström evokes in his examination of a later cognate attempt at overview, the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition. Newspaper articles about it “translat[ed] a moving panoramic vision into a style of reporting”, using phrases such as “‘we must hasten ahead’, ‘now let us visit’, ‘we enter’, ‘we move on to’, as if the aim was to conjure up a live experience even for those who were not there”.77 As Part II will show, panoramas and exhibition displays had much in common. Programs to panoramas of historical events add the necessary historical dimension by combining that touring tense with past-tense back-story. Typically, they use the past tense to describe the build-up, then switch into the present tense to evoke the drama and frozen moment of the historical scene depicted. Typographical variation is often deployed to help indicate a switch between modes. For example, an 1821 “marine peristrephic panorama” of that famous shipwreck the Medusa opens with large-print text that declares: “On your left, in the middle distance, is the Medusa frigate, in the act of shortening sail”, before moving into small print for some historical background: “On the 17th June, 1816, the Medusa […] left […]

 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 119.  Henry Aston Barker and J. Burford, Description of the View of Naples, and Surrounding Scenery: Now Exhibiting in Henry Aston Barker and J. Burford’s Panorama, Strand, 3 of 26 (London: Printed by J. and C. Adlard, 1821), 1. 77  Anders Ekström, “Seeing from Above: A Particular History of the General Observer”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 210. 75 76

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for Senegal […]”.78 The typographical variation suggests that the tour guide information might have been spoken by the attendant lecturer at this show, while the small-print historical background was extra material for the audience to read at home—or potentially vice versa. In this combination of modes, they share something with the railway guides published to equip tentative travelers from the 1830s onward, which as Tina Choi Young describes, combined “two modes”, “the purpose-driven and the narrative”.79 The “purpose-driven” elements of panorama programs are the keys and spoken signposting, suggesting that everything else had primarily narrative function. The program to an 1818–19 peristrephic panorama of the 1816 bombardment of Algiers is particularly notable for its upfront and impassioned engagement with this juxtaposition of modes. The descriptive section immediately combines the present (touring) tense and the past (recounting) tense: “On the left of the spectator, on the height, is the Emperor’s fort, which annoyed the British fleet more than all the other batteries”.80 Before that, however, an introduction tells us: The age of chivalry is not gone! … how much more … ought our feelings and our sympathies to be awakened … at a story, around which no historical or mythological halo hovers; around which no fiction is thrown! around which no lapse of time has lent its aid to veil the crudities of the pencil; where the LIVING SCENE, the vivid drama of REALITY, has just passed before us, in all the lineaments and strongest tints of Truth.81

78  Description of Messrs. Marshall’s Grand Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Shipwreck of the Medusa French Frigate (Glasgow: John Graham and Co., 1821), 1. 79  Tina Young Choi, “The Railway Guide’s Experiments in Cartography: Narrative, Information, Advertising”, Victorian Studies 57, no. 2 (2015): 260, https://doi. org/10.2979/victorianstudies.57.2.251. 80  James Jennings, Charles Marshall ?, and James Brisbane ?, British Valour Displayed in the Cause of Humanity: Being a Description of Messrs. Marshall’s Grand Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Bombardment of the City of Algiers, Thirteenth ed. (Hull: Printed by R. Wells & Co, 1819), 5. This program seems to have duplicated text from the program of another panorama of Algiers the previous year. Oleksijczuk quotes this same text as having formed part of a program for a Barker panorama of 1818, “Description of Lord Exmouth’s Attack upon Algiers. Painted by Henry Aston Barker” (London: Adlard, 1818). She credits the narrative to James Jennings (who was thus presumably also one of the authors of the 1819 booklet). 81  Jennings, Marshall ?, and Brisbane ?, 3.

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In the service of challenging Edmund Burke’s famous declaration that with the French Revolution, “the age of chivalry is gone”, this program echoes Carlyle’s statement at the opening of “The Diamond Necklace” that the “Age of Romance has not ceased” and that romance in fact exists “in Reality alone”.82 The program claims that its subject matter is particularly exciting because (a) it is such recent history that it has never previously been written about, either by historians or in historical novels, and (b) because it can therefore be based on eyewitness accounts. It hopes to win on both counts: this story is as dramatic as any romance, but (as D’Arcy Wood emphasizes in his brief analysis of this passage) it also claims to be true.83 This program of the bombardment of Algiers is also notable for its collage of different genres and typographical formats (see Fig.  2.5), highlighting that panorama programs were required to draw on multiple source-types to produce their intended effect. In this sense, we can analyze them via Bolter and Grusin’s concept of hypermediacy, which describes how pre-existing media are remediated both literally by reuse and figuratively through extant models.84 As well as that impassioned introduction and the tour guide section, the program includes background history, patriotic poems and comic letters home (of dubious authenticity). Immediate successor to the introduction is a set of verses by J. H. Cumming, which stirs up militarism with its warmongering language that conjures up “our birth-right o’er the ‘empire of the waves’”.85 Only later on does the program acknowledge in small print that the British bombardment was assisted by a “Dutch fleet”.86 The entertainment highlight of the Algiers program arguably comes in the interpolated letters. They span both versions of hypermediacy, since they are presented as reused, but their authenticity is dubious: the first is described as coming from “a person in the city of Algiers, who was eye-­ witness of the engagement”, and its more questionable successor, apparently from “a Midshipman on the board the Queen Charlotte, off Algiers, 82  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Leslie George Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 76; Thomas Carlyle, The Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Traill, vol. 28 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896), 329. 83  Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760–1860, 118. 84  Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 5. 85  Jennings, Marshall  ?, and Brisbane  ?, Panorama of the Bombardment of the City of Algiers, 4. 86  Jennings, Marshall ?, and Brisbane ?, 11.

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Fig. 2.5  Photograph of program to Panorama of Algiers, 19. Reproduced by permission of University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections

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to his Friends in London” is introduced as “The following humorous account of the battle [which …] breathes the genuine spirit of a British tar”. This opens: “My Dearest—Turbans and trowsers are so like caps and petticoats, that you in England think the Turks and Moors are little better than old women. If you had seen them the day before yesterday, you would have a different opinion of them”.87 This ostensible Midshipman later goes on to comment, in a way that mirrors equivalent jokes in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), “Now the grief of the story is that we had no officers killed, so no promotion; the Dey’s balls seemed to have the navy list by heart, and took care to avoid everybody who would have made a vacancy”.88 This turns the battle into a choreographed stage performance, a kind of coconut shy writ large. Like the report that “During the attack, the British Consul was confined in a dungeon with a common felon” and told to prepare to be fired from a cannon at dawn, the military engagement becomes a melodrama in which ordinary hierarchies are turned upside down.89 “Old women” become temporarily ferocious, consuls are easily swapped with felons and we might even hope for the death of British officers to increase our lowly hero’s chances of promotion. The potential terror of the scene is thereby transmuted into entertainment, and in carnivalesque fashion, space is found for the voice of a lowly British underdog to undercut the naval and social hierarchy. The above paratext tells us both what we are looking at and how to read it. It serves as a facilitator, but an undeniably ideological one: it gives panorama visitors the impression of overview but in the process guides them to read that view in particular ways. It is worth noting, however, how surprisingly polyphonic these texts are: the authoritative tub-­ thumping narrator and jingoistic verses are also joined by the (however fallacious) midshipman, whose comic self-serving focus on his own experience and prospects undercuts that initial declaration of British “chivalry”. This all reminds us that panoramas could not provide comprehensive overview through vision alone. The programs were necessary to situate the frozen moment of the painting in a narrative context, and in the process they often brought unexpected voices into the rotunda. Reading panoramas via their surviving paratexts therefore provides an important  Jennings, Marshall ?, and Brisbane ?, 19.  Jennings, Marshall ?, and Brisbane ?, 20. 89  Jennings, Marshall ?, and Brisbane ?, 7. 87 88

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supplementary dimension to our (necessarily speculative) reconstruction of how the paintings themselves would have looked. We turn next to the important question of how visitors actually experienced these panoramas.

Panoramic Overview Through Immersion Thomas Babington Macaulay defined his fellow-historians’ duty in 1828 as being “to make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man on an eminence who overlooks the field of a mighty battle”.90 This shows us two conundrums of panoramic perspective that this section seeks to solve. Firstly, Macaulay’s image encourages us to associate panoramic perspective with military topography, which aimed to allow the user to “command and control” the landscape.91 Foucauldian readings of the panorama follow his conviction that new nineteenth-century forms of “discipline” are emblematized in Jeremy Bentham’s penitentiary panopticon.92 However, while these interpretations put the panorama visitor in control, Jacques Lacan sees that visitor as a prisoner at the center of a reverse panopticon. I argue that the extreme polarity of such readings has emerged from an unhelpful elision between ideas of control and of comprehension. Secondly, Macaulay’s passage raises the question of what kinds of immersion and/or overview the panorama can generate. Strangely, his statement is a call for immersion (presence and proximity), but in his example the commander still remains at a safe distance with a measure of geographical—though not temporal—overview. As Mary Favret comments, Macaulay’s imagined “great man” secures “more elevated and unifying impressions” from his height than would be possible from the midst

90  [Thomas Babington Macaulay], “The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II”, ed. Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review 48, no. 95 (September 1828): 97. 91  For modern scholarly claims to this effect, see Bermingham, “Landscape-O-Rama: The Exhibition Landscape at Somerset House and the Rise of Popular Landscape Entertainments”; John Brewer, “Sensibility and the Urban Panorama”, Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2007): 236. 92  Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Brewer; Markman Ellis, “‘Spectacles within Doors’: Panoramas of London in the 1790s”, Romanticism, 14.2 (2008), 133–48. The analogy to Bentham is outlined in Swidzinski, “Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London”, 284.

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of combat.93 The latter part of this section tests out to what extent visitors could gain such impressions from their visits to panoramas. Michel de Certeau critiques the ichnographic perspective from which modern maps are represented, suggesting that this turns the viewer into “a voyeur”. He goes on: “It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god”.94 This powerful distance is attractive, but it creates a false detachment from the here and now. Bruno Latour and Roland Barthes have applied the same critique to the panoramic view, seeing it as oppressively objectifying. Latour evokes a panoramic view from the top floor of a Paris department store whose in situ key promises to help the shopper to “capture the city at a glance”, a promise imbued with military rhetoric.95 Barthes sees the panorama as similarly objectifying, “an image we attempt to decipher, in which we try to recognize known sites, to identify landmarks”, which as a result “can never be consumed as a work of art, the aesthetic interest of a painting ceasing once we try to recognize in it particular points derived from our knowledge”.96 Panoramas become referential and instrumental rather than aesthetic. These post-structuralist theorists are thus critical of elevation’s presumptions. However, we need to differentiate between the top-down (ichnographic) viewpoint and the merely elevated one. Louis Marin distinguishes between the geometric map that proffers its whole content at once, and panoramic maps that create an experiential narrative by requiring the visitor to turn and thereby explore.97 Oleksijczuk views the panorama as “a visuality in between”, which therefore invited a “paradoxical

 Favret, War at a Distance, 214.  de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Social Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 95  Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, “Paris: Invisible City”, 1998, http://www.bruno-­ latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html. The French “embrasser la ville”, however, translates more directly as an embrace or kiss. For text version without the images and animation, see Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, “Paris: Invisible City”, trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and Valerie Pihet, 2, accessed June 1, 2018, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf. 96  Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997), 10. 97  Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A.  Vollrath (London: Macmillan, 1984), 201–32. 93 94

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spectatorship that was by turns masterly and embodied”.98 Any overview we gain from a panorama is achieved by several immersive gazes. Since the human visual field, including fuzzy peripheral vision, covers a maximum of 210° (less for anyone wearing a Regency-era bonnet), we cannot encompass an entire 360° panorama in a single glance. Taking in a panorama requires rotation and contemplation: both movement and time. These multiple moments of immersion—what Richard Maxwell describes as “a series of glances spliced together”—must be combined to produce an overview.99 While Barthes and Latour question the value of the panoramic overview, Jacques Lacan questions whether it even exists. He utterly reverses notions of the “the spectator’s commanding position” and instead suggests that “the observer is subjected to the image’s gaze”, a process that is augmented by the inescapable surround of the panorama painting.100 Lacan’s interpretation brings to the fore humans’ physiological inability to live up to the 360° gaze of the panorama. The panorama constantly watches us, but we must rotate in order to even hope to “master” it. The image of the reverse panopticon makes the panorama visually immersive but psychologically oppressive, the bottom-left quadrant of my schematic diagram of critical responses (see Fig. 2.2). Visitors might feel various kinds of immersion in relation to the scenes they encountered in the panorama rotunda. One strand is that of the person who has never been to the place depicted and who can be easily persuaded to feel as if s/he now is on that hilltop. A second strand is that of the person who has prior knowledge of that place, who might need a little more convincing that this is an effective simulacrum, but who once persuaded could imaginatively project themself into various other locations within the image, entering into a fuller immersion. A third, who comes into play in relation to panoramas of events, is the person who has actually taken part in the action depicted and can project themselves not only into locations but also into conversations and actions with other people in the painting. This possibility is evoked in veterans’ visits to panoramas of battles they had fought in and in the most extreme case, visits by the  Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 98, 2.  Maxwell and Trumpener, “Panorama, Glasshouse, Museum: Alexander von Humboldt, Franz Boas, Gustaf Kolthoff”, 155. 100  Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, 130. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Karnac Books, 2004), 67–78, 106. 98 99

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commanding general. This leads us to the crucial argument of this chapter and book: the more immersed you are, the more overview you have the opportunity of gaining. Far from being opposites, overview and immersion exist in causal sequence: overview is sought and gained through immersion. It is nonetheless not an automatic process: transforming immersion into overview requires a detached critical distance. In recent decades, the value of this stance has been probed and ultimately affirmed by George Levine and Amanda Anderson. Levine argues that the trope of “dying to know”—regularly invoked by nineteenth-century scientists who claimed to efface the self in the pursuit of knowledge—is so difficult as to be almost delusional, but he ultimately evaluates it as a commendable aspiration.101 Anderson suggests that “materialist, feminist, poststructuralist, and identity-­based” condemnation of detachment has been too total and un-­ self-­aware: those critics accuse detachment of “disavow[ing] its own violence and exclusivity”, but also sometimes need and deploy it as a “negative freedom that permits … exposure [or] irony”.102 She emphasizes that “Victorian authors themselves actively and even obsessively engaged questions about critical detachment” and were not unaware of its internal contradictions.103 Since then, Mary Favret and Mark Salber Phillips have probed these issues further, showing that historical or geographical distance does not automatically produce critical or emotional distance. Phillips reminds us that chronological distance from events can often enable greater emotional proximity, as we come to sympathize with those who during warfare were seen monolithically as the enemy. This temporal distance can diminish the distantiation previously erected by ideological barriers. Professionalized history since the nineteenth century has encouraged critical distance, but as historiographical counter-currents from Romanticism to “bottom-up” history to microhistory have recognized, history is also a means of recovering the past and keeping it close. As Phillips articulates, history is “fundamentally a literature of mediation”.104 Favret further demonstrates—in ways I have expanded upon elsewhere—how geographical distance can enable representation, but can also stifle affective  Levine, Dying to Know.  Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 7, 24, 7. 103  Anderson, 9. 104  Phillips, On Historical Distance, xi. 101 102

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engagement, especially when depicting “war at a distance”.105 While distance in time can re-awaken disinterested sympathy, distance in space can make us callous or voyeuristic, and thus we return to survey the panorama form with potential hostility. Let us turn, therefore, to three snapshots through the panorama’s half-­ century British heyday, which give us some insights into the range of immersion and/or overview the form could provoke. Several leading Romantics had notably uneasy reactions to the panorama. Wordsworth conveyed hostility to—or at least “hesitation” about—the panorama form in The Prelude (1805), denying that its mechanical reality illusion could truly count as sublime.106 His contemporary John Constable’s paintings were often panoramic in their wide-angled field of view, but Constable’s reaction to the panorama itself notably provides ballast for Lacan’s provocative proposal. On visiting Richard Reinagle’s 1803 panorama of Rome, Constable commented that such a painter “views Nature minutely and cunningly, but with no greatness or breadth”, where the descriptors evoke immersive detail but deny the possibility of overview.107 Gillen D’Arcy Wood interprets Constable’s reservations as stemming from the lack of any single “privileged station at which he might feel himself, most fundamentally, to be actually in front of the painting. Denied also therefore was the opportunity … to interiorize the image”.108 Because the image has no edges and no focal point, it is nigh impossible to memorize its composition or even to know when one has seen it all. This suggests that we need to distinguish between at least two types of “mastery” in relation to the panorama. Constable’s response reminds us that the supposedly commanding central position of the panorama visitor does not automatically equal comprehensive overview.

105  Favret, War at a Distance, 219–29. See Kingstone, “Panoramas, Patriotic Voyeurism, and the ‘Indian Mutiny.’” 106  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Stephen Gill (Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 111–12. Book 7.248–64. See Ross King, “Wordsworth, Panoramas, and the Prospect of London”, Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 1 (1993): 57–73; J. Jennifer Jones, “Absorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panorama”, Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 3 (2006): 360; Ellis, “‘Spectacles within Doors,’” 144–45. 107  Qtd. by both Altick, The Shows of London, 137; Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760–1860, 104. 108  Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760–1860, 104.

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Other accounts from panorama visitors, however, suggest that immersion might generate or at least legitimize generalization. On visiting an 1814 panorama of the previous year’s Battle of Vittoria, Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury wrote in her diary: It gave too faithful a representation of a scene of battle; and a stranger, a gentlemanlike looking person, who was there, with his arm in a sling, and had been at Vittoria the day after the battle was fought, said it was most exactly pourtrayed [sic]. The dead and the dying were lying strewn about; and yet, even in gazing at the representation, I sympathized with the enthusiasm of the living, and the glory of the conquerors, more than with the sufferings of the fallen. How much more must the same sentiment be excited by the reality! how fortunate, that this sympathy in catching the spirit which flames around us, is so strongly implanted in the human breast! The view, too, of Lord Wellington and the other Generals, coolly gazing around, and reconnoitring the evolutions of thousands, although involved in smoke and dust and danger, gave a grand idea of the qualities necessary to a commander, and raised the scale of intellectual glory ten thousand times above that of mere personal valour.109

This account veers between several affective responses. First Campbell Bury expresses discomfort with the panorama’s excessive verisimilitude (but uses the bolstering example of the battle veteran to confirm it as verisimilitude rather than exaggeration). Then that small mid-sentence word “yet” shifts the priority from pity to patriotism, focusing less on “sufferings” than on “glory”. She shifts to endorse not only the panorama but, by implication, the warfare that it records, and the Romantic-era cult of sentiment. Here we see how the reality illusion generated immersion, which in turn generated what Bury saw as the correct sentiment: patriotic celebration of necessary warfare. Here she moves to overview not necessarily through but certainly via immersion. In this particular instance, the dynamic is complicated by the presence of the wounded veteran, who brings the experience of battle both physically and emotionally proximate, but does not prevent Bury from shifting her perspective to that of the commander. She sees Wellington and his fellow Generals as resisting 109  23 June 1814. Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Time of George the Fourth, Interspersed with Original Letters from the Late Queen Caroline, and from Various Other Distinguished Persons, vol. 2 (Paris: E. Fourmestraux and Co., 1838), 8–9, https:// books.google.co.uk/books?id=CkPgocOZnIAC&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Italics original.

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immersion: their “cool” gaze and decision-making implies the “critical distance” we associate with overview and is driven less by visual clarity (they are “involved in smoke and dust”) than by cognitive resilience. Having said this, if we turn to the Duke of Wellington’s own reactions to panoramas, we find that even military commanders could be moved as much by the panorama’s opportunities for immersion as for overview. In 1846, he visited a panorama of the First Anglo-Sikh War’s very recent Battle of Sobraon. The Illustrated London News commented at the time that “his Grace’s countenance evinced the deepest interest, and was lighted up with the most vivid enthusiasm”.110 Years later, an article in Chambers’s Journal recalled that same visit. It relates how “the stage on which [Wellington] stood might well be supposed to be a height from which the commander-in-chief was surveying and controlling the fluctuations of the conflict”.111 The Chambers’s journalist describes Wellington as having been ready to reprise his long-past military command, as in fact he did in 1848 to oversee the defense against the Chartists. Apparently on experiencing the panorama, “contrary to the usual impassiveness of temperament which the Duke exhibited, he became intensely excited, and seemed to chafe against the barriers which restrained him from the field he so distinctly realized”.112 The article also references another newspaper account comparing Wellington to an old war-horse in a Walter Scott poem. This imagined retiree “at the trumpet’s sound, / Erects his mane, and neighs, and paws the ground”.113 All this reinforces the association between military command and panoramic overview: Wellington’s sense of “surveying and controlling” is facilitated through the viewing platform serving as a “height” suitable for a position of command. It is nonetheless important to recognize the immersion central to Wellington’s own experience of the panorama. His sense of excitement and “enthusiasm” is unlikely to mirror exactly his emotions when truly in command of an army; instead, the excitement comes from the illusion of presence, and the astonishment of reprisal, as if it were possible after all to relive the past. Wellington’s commanding overview is achieved through immersion. 110  “The Duke of Wellington’s Visit to Burford’s Panorama of the Battle of Sobraon”, Illustrated London News, June 13, 1846. 111  “Panoramas”, Chambers’s Journal, no. 316 (January 21, 1860): 34–35. 112  “Panoramas”, 35. 113  “Panoramas”, 35. The poem is (1817), Walter Scott, “Mr Kemble’s Farewell Address, on Taking Leave of the Edinburgh Stage”, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), 665.

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Conclusions Panoramas cannot be reduced to “a version of” or “a precursor to” any other single medium, whether that be cinema or virtual reality, journalism or history writing. We need to take them seriously as contributing, throughout the long nineteenth century, to the process of mediating recent events into historical form. They were neither as immediate or as ephemeral as newspaper accounts: some panorama painters did impressive independent reconnaissance, but they also drew on and depended on the work of journalists. On the other hand, they were present in people’s imagination and memories long before any formal narrative histories could be written and published, so they are most fruitfully understood as a third term between those two. Commentators have often thought of panoramas as existing in two types (landscape and historical), but many panoramas were what I call “topical landscapes”, and themselves contributed, though obliquely, to history-making too. Narrative is the panorama’s Achilles heel: it can only show one moment and cannot therefore offer a chronological or narrative overview of the different stages or transformations involved in the historical event it depicts. Panorama paintings therefore supplemented their frozen moments with narrative paratexts, which aimed to add a sense of noise, movement and chronological change to their static images. We therefore need to understand panoramas through and with their paratexts, as multimedia phenomena. Finally, this chapter has shown that rather than being tools of solely overview or immersion, as previous scholars have argued, the two are integrally interlinked. Panoramas fundamentally sought to be immersive and for certain viewers also generated overview. They created overview through immersion, in a symbiotic co-dependence between the two. I therefore want to rehabilitate panoramic perspective from its Foucauldian critics. Although it was often used to bolster colonialist, imperialist and militarist narratives, it could be used (and, as I will show next, adapted into text) in valuably defamiliarizing ways. Most fundamentally, it was necessary—as we will see further in the following chapter—for those struggling to represent recent events in historical form.

CHAPTER 3

Panoramic Perspective in Histories of the French Revolution: Thomas Carlyle Versus Archibald Alison

Panoramic perspective was soon taken beyond the canvas: writers across multiple genres adopted and remediated it into textual form to enable their own projects to achieve the same kind of overview and more. As I show in this chapter and the next, writers extrapolated and extended panoramic perspective far beyond its painted format: beyond the elevated distance of a hill-top, they conjured up god-like cosmic distances, added movement through flight over the scene, lifted up rooftops to access intimate spaces and imagine people’s emotions and evoked the passing of time in ways that the original 360° panoramas could not. This chapter examines how panoramic perspective was used to help write history. Through this extrapolated figurative panoramic perspective, “panorama” became not only a medium of painting but also a powerful visual concept. Just as Jonathan Crary revised his earlier focus on vision to argue that “attention, as a constellation of texts and practices, is much more than a question of the gaze”, we cannot restrict our attention to the visual alone.1 Panoramic perspective is just as much about cognition and imagination. By no means every instance of the word “panorama” in nineteenth-­century writing signifies panoramic perspective, because the 1  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 2.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_3

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term was so quickly detached from its moorings to become any inclusive survey.2 Nor can we assume that every depiction of an elevated view is necessarily panoramic, since the word might have “simply provided a convenient label for a visual experience people had always had”.3 However, the ease with which the neologism “panorama” took root suggests that it filled a gap.4 I read historians’ approaches as panoramic when they adopt four distinctive characteristics of the painted panorama. It takes an elevated viewpoint; it features a distant and therefore high horizon, giving the writer a notable depth of focus; it concentrates not on foreground (panoramas had no such thing) but on a middle distance, meaning that groups rather than individuals tend to be prioritized; and there is no single focal point but instead a range of (often mobile) perspectives. The chapter’s first half shows how panoramic perspective generated imaginary spatial distance that could substitute for hindsight and make up for historians’ lack of temporal distance from events. As I show in the second half, this perspective could broaden the social view and represent inconspicuous masses of people in ways that—as Emily Steinlight has recently argued of novels—embraces the sheer scale of the contemporaneous population.5 I compare here the work of two very different historians writing in the 1830s about the French Revolution and its wars, who take very different approaches to panoramic perspective. Thomas Carlyle is best known now for his self-appointed role as Old Testament-style prophet and social critic of the early-Victorian era. His most laboriously produced works, however, were histories, and The French Revolution: A History (1837) was his first foray into the genre. Its radicalism comes into relief when we bring it into comparison with a coeval work by a fellow Scot, Archibald Alison’s History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (10 volumes, 1833–42; henceforth History of Europe). Alison was an Edinburgh lawyer and a staunch Tory, 2  As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, publications were using the term “panorama” in their titles to imply a capacious survey rather than any visual overview: these include The Political Panorama (1801); Literary Panorama (periodical in publication by 1806); Mary Sterndale, The Panorama of Youth (1806); J. Smith, The Panorama of Science and Art (1812). On these, see Wilcox, “Panoramania!,” 41. 3  Wilcox, 41. 4  Altick, The Shows of London, 132. 5  Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018), 19.

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“the political mainstay” of the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, whose proprietor William Blackwood also published his History of Europe.6 The one full-length study on Alison emphasizes his Enlightenment values, and these, including his commitment to balance and exclusively gradualist change, come through clearly in History of Europe.7 The points of similarity and divergence between Carlyle’s work and Alison’s show us simultaneous alternative ways in which the French Revolution could be conceived and presented, and other non-panoramic strategies for dealing with temporal proximity. This allows us to consider why a historian might choose to use those various strategies and brings into relief the distinctive qualities of Carlyle’s approach. Several recent scholars have turned to examine nineteenth-century writers’ use of panoramic perspective, but most of these focus on the panorama’s spatial capacities. Alison Byerly and Jonathan Potter showcase the “virtual travel” that the panorama enabled, while Vance Byrd examines panoramas of their audience’s own home cities.8 Byerly goes further by pursuing at length novelists’ use of “panoramic perspective” and what she calls “verbal panoramism”, but still focuses on virtual travel, whereas this study focuses on the temporal and historical dimension of textual panoramic perspective.9 The most significant precursor and inspiration of my analysis in this regard is Billie Melman, who devotes a chapter to Carlyle’s French Revolution and explicitly analyses it as panoramic. Her chapter is rich with insights about “spectacle and the people”, and I build on these by attending specifically to the challenge of recent-historical overview that Carlyle sets himself, and by bringing Carlyle’s work into productive comparison with Alison.10 French historians produced multiple competing histories of the 1789 Revolution across the subsequent century, with versions by Adolphe Thiers, Philippe Buchez and Jacques Roux, François Mignet and Alphonse Esquiros all laying the groundwork for the 1830 failed revolution, and 6  A contemporary biographical entry described Alison as “strongly opposed to all innovations”: The Men of the Time; or, Sketches of Living Notables (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1852), 16, http://archive.org/details/menoftimeorsketc00newy. 7  Michael Michie, An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 8  Byerly, Are We There Yet?; Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing; Byrd, A Pedagogy of Observation. 9  Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 33. 10  Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 66.

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versions by Jules Michelet, Louis Blanc and Alphonse de Lamartine beginning publication just before the 1848 revolution.11 While all these French authors identified as liberal, republican or socialist, Carlyle and Alison were both fundamentally conservatives, though of very different types. Clare Simmons has shown how both Carlyle’s and Alison’s histories, unlike Whig or liberal histories that trace a narrative (implicitly of progress), instead present the past as a repository of “examples”, “analogy” and even biblical “typology”.12 However, while Carlyle held a cyclical vision of history, he was also influenced by Romantic historicism. This modifies his view of history as analogy—in which human nature remains constant—and necessitates a long or elevated view of extended transformation. For this reason, Carlyle’s history draws on panoramas where Alison’s does not, and the two works produce two very different reading experiences. Carlyle’s style is full of lurches between time periods, settings and viewpoints. His history is not easy to navigate: his chapter titles are eccentric (“Astraea Redux”, “Petition in Hieroglyphs”, “Questionable”, “Maurepas”) and dates not always in evidence. His writing is so full of allusions—Robespierre becomes “the seagreen Incorruptible”—that it has always needed prior knowledge or external glosses; one review declared that “by itself it is unintelligible”.13 By contrast, Alison’s text is ostensibly clear and organized. His Preface neatly divides the period 1789–1815 into four phases that he envisages as four volumes, though it would eventually grow to ten volumes: Alison was not immune to writer’s bloat, and he was lampooned by Benjamin Disraeli as “Mr Wordy”. Despite their shared propensity to length, the two historians’ structures are highly contrasting. The metaphors that the two writers draw on are also very different. As Simmons traces, Alison focuses on dismemberment of the body politic, whereas Carlyle sees that ancien régime body as diseased and the

11  On these latter three, see Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12  Clare A. Simmons, “Disease and Dismemberment: Two Conservative Metaphors for the French Revolution,” Prose Studies 15, no. 2 (August 1, 1992): 210, https://doi. org/10.1080/01440359208586469. 13  “The French Revolution: A History,” The Literary Gazette, May 27, 1837, 330. For “seagreen incorruptible”, see Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, ed. David R. Sorensen and Brett E. Kinser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 363, 504, 565. First usage in Part II, Book 4, Chapter 4: “Attitude”.

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revolution as bringing further disease.14 More generally, Carlyle’s text is full of Biblical imagery that echoes the Book of Revelation, likening “Democracy” to a “whirlwind” and the “Insurrectionary Movement” to a “volcanic lava-flood”.15 Above all, his imagery is panoramic, whereas Alison’s neoclassical style allows him to resist panoramic perspective altogether, gaining overview instead from a lofty faith in the continuity of human nature and the applicability of transhistorical aphorisms.

Temporal Overview Carlyle’s trademark perspective is from above: swooping over rooftops, looking down on unfolding events or drifting off into a noumenal realm. In the opening chapter of The French Revolution: A History (1837), he evokes a galactic image of “the Versailles Galaxy all scattered asunder, grouped into new ever-shifting Constellations”.16 This envisages him watching from elsewhere in the universe. Later in the work, he recounts the night before the final collapse of the Bourbon monarchy. Carlyle addresses us: “Reader, fancy not, in thy languid way, that Insurrection is easy. Insurrection is difficult: each individual uncertain even of his next neighbour; totally uncertain of his distant neighbours”.17 He follows this helplessly atomized vision with a panoramic one: Could the Reader take an Asmodeus’s Flight, and waving open all roofs and privacies, look down from the Tower of Notre Dame, what a Paris were it! Of treble-voice whimperings or vehemence, or bass-voice growlings, dubitations; Courage screwing itself to desperate defiance; Cowardice trembling silent within barred doors; – and all round, Dullness calmly snoring.18

Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) described Carlyle’s stance as one that “forces us … to look down on the revolution from a skyey post of observation where He sits, like some belfry gargoyle”, and as Billie Melman puts it,  Simmons, “Disease and Dismemberment,” 214, 217, 219.  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 15, 560. Part I, Book 1, Chapter 2: “Realised Ideals”; Part III, Book 3, Chapter 1: “Cause and Effect”. This imagery is also used in Past and Present (1848) and Frederick the Great (1858). On the latter, see Brian Young, The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. 16  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 24. Part I, Book 1, Chapter 3: “Viaticum”. 17  Carlyle, 457. Part II, Book 6, Chapter 6: “The Steeples at Midnight”. 18  Carlyle, 458. 14 15

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“the reader/viewer shares the historian’s/prophet’s position”.19 Both gain an imagined overview. Carlyle also uses the mechanics of the panorama to go beyond visual insight. In the above passage, both he and the reader access emotions that are by definition invisible. These affective states and capitalized personal emotions are simultaneously highly mythologized—individual personifications consonant with the Greek deities “Atropos and Nox” he invokes at the end of the paragraph—and a synecdoche for the masses of ordinary Parisians in these respective emotional states. Carlyle seems to believe that only the physically impossible—and demonic—overview of the panoramic perspective can give the historian true insight into the phenomenon that is this revolution. Carlyle’s influence can be seen on other historians: Harriet Martineau also adopted panoramic perspective to justify and facilitate her work. In one of her early books, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838; a proto-sociologist manual), she comments that “to stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city”.20 In a later article she wrote for the Westminster Review on the 1851 census, she borrowed Carlyle’s Asmodeus’ flight. Here she evokes Carlyle’s same striking image of a supernatural creature lifting up people’s roofs to reveal their internal state, though for slightly different purposes. That night, though no diable boiteaux was invoked to help, every housetop in the kingdom was taken off, and every inmate portrayed, in his or her mental and bodily state, age, mode of life, business, &c. &c.21

Martineau uses the passive voice to depersonalize the census’s rather invasively probing night-time eye. Here the census is a rational (and this time specifically non-diabolical) panoramic mechanism, providing a statistical overview. A few pages later, she harks back to that fateful night to suggest that “If sleep is, as is said, the great leveller, surely a census is the only loadstone [sic] which agglomerates us all, leaving no stray particle to 19  Vernon Lee, “Carlyle and the Present Tense,” Contemporary Review, Studies in Literary Psychology, iii, no. 85 (1904): 390–91; Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 71. Melman also quotes the passage from Lee: Melman, 87. 20  Harriet Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1838), 50. 21  Harriet Martineau, “Results of the Census of 1851,” Westminster Review 61 (April 1854): 345.

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be lost”.22 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson comments wryly that “the fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions”.23 That encapsulates nicely Martineau’s fantasy here, where the census is an efficient tool that can depict the nation perfectly, and shows how the panorama and the compilation approaches could work together. For Martineau here, the census compiles data for the purposes of overview, just as (as I discuss in Chap. 6) a similar desire for panoramic overview fueled protosociological investigations later in the century. For Carlyle (as for Martineau), panoramic perspective offers access to truths that would otherwise be inaccessible. Anderson and Byerly argue that Victorian novelists were often skeptical about panoramic distance, since it could “obscure the crucial realities of lived experience”.24 Byerly traces how in novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, panoramic perspective is that of a hypothetical “traveler” or “casual observer”, and it is the novelist’s role—and reader’s task—to go beyond these “superficial” perspectives by attending in close-up to the characters’ more complex and unexpected lives.25 However, the same is not the case for my examples, where panoramic perspective offers insights, not snap judgments. While panoramic perspective might not always show us everything, for Carlyle and Martineau—as for Hardy, as we will see in the next chapter—its overview reveals truths invisible to human eyes and affective insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. For Carlyle, to do justice to the story of the French Revolution requires a cosmic scale. He sees huge temporal overview as being necessary to identify the roots of the revolution. So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet [c.939–996] downwards, had been adding together, century transmitting it with increase to century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of man by man. […] The harvest of long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly of late; and now it is grown white, and is reaped rapidly, as it were, in one day.26

 Martineau, 347.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 166. 24  Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 4. 25  Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 74. 26  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 627. Part III, Book 5, Chapter 1: “Rushing Down”. 22 23

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The “harvest of long centuries” evokes the enormous scale evoked by Asmodeus’ flight, but this time we require not cosmic physical distance but temporal distance. Carlyle seeks to gain a kind of substitute hindsight (a view of the revolution’s causes) to make up for his lack of chronological distance forward from its effects. Almost as soon as he creates this impression, however, he undermines it with a lurch: the temporal marker “now” pulls us into an imaginary shared present of the 1780s, forcing us to situate ourselves in the past we are reading about. By contrast, while Alison acknowledges that ancien régime France was in need of change, his metaphors emphasize not its excessive “Wickedness” but how excessively it was overthrown. Alison’s project, which he had begun researching by 1830, was propelled by a belief that the 1830 revolution in France would descend into chaos, as well as a fear that “a revolution was approaching in Britain” out of the accelerating reform agitation.27 The work’s Preface describes how we will see “the irresistible nature of the current into which men are drawn, who commit themselves to the stream of political innovation”.28 In this retrospectively fatalistic imagery of the revolution as an unstoppable flood, Alison’s influence echoed right through to late-Victorian liberal history writing by Spencer Walpole, who I have written on previously.29 Alison argues for gradualist reform as a way to escape these overwhelming currents: “It is by slow degrees, and imperceptible additions, that all the great changes of nature are accomplished. Vegetation, commencing with lichens, swells to the riches and luxuriance of the forest”.30 These organic metaphors prefigure Darwin’s famous later image of the “entangled bank”, but more directly work to endorse God’s mysterious ways.31 Most significantly for our purposes, Carlyle embraces panoramic perspective, whereas Alison does not. Carlyle uses it to gain overviews that are visual and temporal (as we see here) and also social (as we turn to in this chapter’s latter half). He was celebrated for his hard-won overview. This applied across his oeuvre: when he published Past and Present (1843),  Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland, 131.  Archibald Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, vol. 1 (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1833), xviii. 29  Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 108. See Spencer Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1890), 4. 30  Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:lxx. 31  See also Simmons, “Disease and Dismemberment,” 212. 27 28

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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a review of it so rhapsodic that it was used as an introduction in subsequent editions.32 In this account, Emerson celebrates the insights Carlyle gains from his elevated perspective, watching as if on horseback, “always in the mount”. For Emerson, this enables Carlyle to “dispose objects in their right places”, since his “eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other”. His very next words state, as if as a result: “The book makes great approaches to true contemporary history, a very rare success”.33 This suggests that it is the overview gained from panoramic perspective that enables Carlyle’s contemporary history narrative. However, Emerson also suggests that the visual elevation Carlyle offers is not quite enough. He describes Past and Present as a “panorama of brilliant images”, but he is not convinced that this quite amounts to a narrative, let alone a definitive history.34 He turns to warning his friend against the Scylla and Charybdis of over-dramatizing the present moment and of over-idealizing the past. For Emerson, Time stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. … The most elaborate history of today will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of today is yet three ages off.35

Emerson’s Biblical rhetoric, echoing both the notion that “To every thing there is a season, … A time to be born, a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8) and that perhaps “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), suggests a benign inevitability to the gradual emergence of a noble truth. In reverse, however, Emerson seems to suggest that in Past and Present Carlyle is over-hyping present or recent events, individuals or phenomena 32  Carlyle and Emerson had already worked in support of each other’s careers at this point: Emerson was instrumental in prompting Little and Brown (Boston) to publish a US edition of The French Revolution in 1837; Carlyle wrote a preface for Emerson’s volume of Essays (London: James Fraser, 1841). 33  [Ralph Waldo Emerson], “Past and Present,” ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 4, no. 1 (July 1844): 96. 34  [Emerson], 98. 35  [Emerson], 98.

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who with the benefit of hindsight may not seem so significant or so awe-­ inspiring after all. (This is a debate that continued and was articulated again by Leslie Stephen in 1900, as we will see in Chap. 8.) For Emerson, blips of the present loom overly large in Carlyle’s vision or fallaciously seem unique. Emerson goes on to remind Carlyle not to over-idealize the past. He adds: “The ancients are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?”36 Here Emerson calls for Carlyle to bring his distant figures—for example, the tenderly evoked medieval Abbot Samson—down to earth and to recognize their equivalence with us prosaic modern individuals. Overall, Emerson’s review suggests that in writing Past and Present a few years later, Carlyle has forgotten the lessons of his French Revolution and has inappropriately treated the medieval past and 1840s present too differently from each other, in a way that undermines his own aspiration to temporal overview. On the other hand, Carlyle arguably never aimed to produce a definitive account of either his present or recent past. As Mark Cumming has described it, “Much of the calculated uncertainty of Carlyle’s text arises from its presentation of an action not yet closed”.37 Carlyle frequently questions the value of hindsight. His deliberately provisionally titled The French Revolution: a history, with its notably indefinite article, indicates that he was not convinced that genuine overview on this phenomenon was possible. In practice, we are constantly required to act without hindsight. At one point in discussing the National Convention that governed France from 1792 to 1795, he asks rhetorically: Truly, if man, as the Philosophers brag, did to any extent look before and after, what, one may ask, in many cases would become of him? What, in this case, would become of these Seven-hundred and Forty-nine men? The Convention, seeing clearly before and after, were a paralysed Convention. Seeing clearly to the length of its own nose, it is not paralysed.38

 [Emerson], 100.  Mark Cumming, A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle’s French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 64. 38  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 525. Part III, Book 2, Chapter 1: “The Deliberative”. 36 37

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Sometimes lack of hindsight is the only thing stopping us from giving up! Ignorance breeds confidence, but Carlyle treads carefully to avoid outright condemning this ignorance, because—as he so often acknowledges— we are all in the dark. Carlyle’s French Revolution is famously written almost entirely in the present tense. This is more than just a stylistic tic: it is a philosophical position. As John Rosenberg relates, Vernon Lee experimented with transferring one of Carlyle’s trademark vocal passages—the account of Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat—from the present into the past tense.39 As she demonstrated, it turns the text flat, disjointed rather than dramatic. Fragments that in the original represent dramatic speech, implied exchanges and replies, become meaningless. Carlyle himself declared that it is a most lying thing that same Past Tense always: so beautiful, sad, almost Elysian-sacred, “in the moonlight of Memory,” it seems; and seems only. For observe: always, one most important element is surreptitiously (we not noticing it) withdrawn from the Past Time: the haggard element of Fear! Not there does Fear dwell, nor Uncertainty, nor Anxiety; but it dwells here; haunting us, tracking us; running like an accursed ground-discord through all the music-tones of our Existence;—making the Tense a mere Present one! Just so is it with this of Louis.40

His use of “here” in this passage really stakes his claim to the revolution’s present, and the pronoun “us” is fantastically ambiguous. As Ann Rigney has shown of contemporaneous French histories, when Roland Barthes presumed that historical discourse has no addressee, he short-­ sightedly ignored the long rhetorical tradition that these Romantic historians were still part of.41 Carlyle’s “us” takes one step further, however: it potentially refers to himself and his reader, but also opens out to imply mutuality between him and the fearful French inhabitants he is in the process of depicting. In this sense, the visual overview but temporal immersion of the panoramic perspective—the frozen moment—was especially helpful for its refusal to draw distant conclusions or to retreat from urgent 39  Lee, “Carlyle and the Present Tense”; John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 77–79. 40  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 534–35. Part III, Book 2, Chapter 3: “Discrowned”. 41  Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution, 2. She refers to Roland Barthes, “Le Discours de l’histoire”, Social Science Information, 6.4 (1967), 63–75.

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“fear” to funereal “sad” platitudes. This ultimately suggests that we need both overview and immersion. Where Carlyle suggests that action requires proximity and might in fact be inhibited by critical distance, Alison embraces a standpoint of classical poise that insists on seeing both sides of every question. His style is reminiscent of Edward Gibbon’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s in its devotion to balance. A typical sentence might be this one, which opens Chap. 2: If the condition of the lower orders in France, anterior to the Revolution, is examined, it will not be deemed surprising that a convulsion should have arisen; and if humanity sees much to deplore in the calamities it produced, it will find much cause for consolation in the grievances it has removed.42

This lofty and arch-like style rises to an apparent conclusion at more than one mid-point but then generates its complementary opposite, producing a rounded whole more impressive in its lyrical shape than in its overall implications. Alison freely mixes pluperfect, perfect, present and future tenses, in a way that situates him in an omniscient viewpoint outside temporality, but does so from a very different philosophical position to Carlyle. This sentence format is repeated many times over the course of Alison’s ten volumes. It suggests—something we will come back to—that even events that seem bewildering are actually part of a Providential plan. Where Carlyle throughout his career deplored what he viewed as the artificiality of classical convention, Alison’s History embraces both the long view and the structure it gives him. Comparisons with classical examples enable him to set the apparently unprecedented events of the Revolutionary period in a reassuring pattern. The fifth volume, for example, closes with a forward-looking projection of when “Wellington, alternately the Fabius and Marcellus of the contest, prepared in the fields illustrated by a former Scipio, the triumphs of a second Zanna”.43 There is no glossing for modern readers; Alison expects us to recognize and be inspired by this typology. Alison is also aided by the scaffolding that a classical dependence on aphorism and transhistorical comparison brings him. He regularly opens  Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:61.  Archibald Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, vol. 5 (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1833), 864. 42 43

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chapters with sets of three consecutive paragraphs: the first drawing on a quotation, the next on a historical example, then giving a comparative proclamation. For example, Chap. 3 opens with the statement that “The higher branches of science, says Plato, are not useful to all, but only to a few”.44 The second paragraph opens: “Science had never attained a more commanding situation than in France at the close of the eighteenth century”, and the third, “History affords no example of an era in which innovation was so hastily purposed, and ambition so blindly worshipped”.45 This formulaic structure allows Alison to draw cross-period or even universalizing comparisons beyond the Revolution itself. Instead of the specific anecdotes and vivid scene-painting of Carlyle, Alison focuses on the political principles and timeless moral conclusions we can draw from his study. The conclusion to the previous chapter, for example, featured paragraphs that open “The love of real freedom may always be distinguished from the passion for popular power” and “It is the intention of Nature, that the power of the people should increase as society advances”.46 Alison’s account is rich in such generalizable subjunctive statements that can be detached from the context of the French Revolution: indeed, their easy detachability might make us question to what extent they really describe that revolution. That chapter ends with a statement about “the true patriot”: our writer declares that “in periods when liberty is endangered, he [sic] will side with the popular, in moments of agitation, support the monarchical party”.47 The future verb “will” here indicates that this is not so much a historical statement as an aspirational one: it is intended to apply across time, to an ideal or universal Man, but is particularly aimed at shaping the future behavior of the readers of this book. Alison’s History of Europe therefore insists upon transhistorical overview, but at the expense of immersion. Alison valued philosophic history that offered “the general views drawn from particular facts, the conclusions applicable to all ages”.48 This did not meet with approval from J.  S. Mill, who had considered writing a ­history of the French Revolution himself and who by this time was supporting Carlyle’s own attempt. In a cutting review he dismissed Alison’s  Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:118.  Alison, 1:119. 46  Alison, 1:115. 47  Alison, 1:117. 48   Archibald Alison, “British History During the Eighteenth Century,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 57, no. 353 (March 1845): 360. 44 45

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aphorisms as “barren”, and “such as a country-gentleman, accustomed to be king of his company, talks after dinner”, a style later mocked by George Eliot in the figure of Middlemarch’s Mr. Brooke.49 Alison’s history nonetheless sold well in a range of editions: a luxury library edition, an octavo “Crown edition” for middle-class readers and a “People’s Edition” for the working classes.50 Many readers of Carlyle’s French Revolution would have had a prior foundation of facts from Alison’s work.51 Perhaps understanding Carlyle’s cryptic swings between immersion and overview might be aided by such prior reading, and the two approaches could work together after all.

Social History When early-Victorian historians adopted and remediated panoramic perspective, this also facilitated and propelled a turn toward nascent social history. Panoramic perspective could give historians of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars an unexpected power to represent the social aspect of contemporary history: as we have seen, it substituted for hindsight and gave access to interiority, and here I argue that it also enabled those historians to represent social shifts. Steinlight has recently argued (in challenge to the New Historicist and Foucauldian consensus) that “mass life is not a phobic object” for nineteenth-century novels, which exaggerate crowding but turn this into “sources of narrative energy”.52 I argue here that this was also the case for Carlyle. Panoramas decentered individual heroic agency, and this was influential in enabling social history narratives. Most lives and events fall below the radar of the grand victories or ceremonial occasions depicted in panoramas. Those obscure lives or events can only be detected by later 49  John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XX - Essays on French History and Historians, ed. John M. Robson, vol. 20 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 116, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-­ collected-­works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-xx-essays-on-french-history-and-historians. Mill’s review was originally published in The Monthly Repository (July 1833), 507–11. 50  Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland, 152. Hedva Ben-Israel also identifies Alison’s as “by far the best-selling history of the French Revolution in England and America almost to the end of the century”. Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 152. 51  This is the plausible speculation of John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 100. 52  Steinlight, Populating the Novel, 19.

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generations through immersive reading about that period’s everyday life or through access to its surviving tangible objects. In total, however, they comprise the majority of a population, so any generalizations about them depend on overview. In written histories of the early nineteenth century, this was typically clustered and subsumed under the heading of “manners and customs”, in an ambivalent acknowledgment that these were historically specific, but situating them as light relief from the weighty affairs of state. In the Romantic period and onward, some historians began to use the social implications of panoramic perspective to help them represent this majority. While Alison took a heroic approach to his narrative’s protagonists, Carlyle used his expanded version of panoramic perspective to narrate a proto-social history, representing large groups of people and even their interiority. However, his capacity to do this was limited by the intrinsically distancing effects of panoramic perspective. Let us start with a baseline: the conventional conservative and Royalist way to write about the French monarchy’s humiliation and eventual executions. Alison’s conservatism leads him to take quite a different stance from Carlyle on these key players. His account of the removal of the French royal family from Versailles, and the invasion of the Queen’s bedchamber, leans heavily on Edmund Burke’s famous lament that “the age of chivalry is gone”.53 We hear it behind his description—with its intimations of rape—of how “the assassins rushed into her room a few minutes after she had left it, and, enraged at finding their victim escaped, pierced her bed with their bayonets”.54 Alison is even more lamenting about the execution of Louis XVI. While Carlyle pities and derides that king, Alison makes him a martyr. Alison’s own autobiography suggested that reading about Louis XVI’s “angelic virtues” in martyrdom made him “resolve to devote [him]self” to writing a history of the revolution.55 While as we have seen, Alison’s History mostly prioritizes pious generalization over Carlylean anecdotes and set-piece scenes, it recounts the morning of Louis’ execution at almost real-time pace. “In passing through the court of the Temple, Louis cast a last look at the Tower, which contained all that was dear to him in the world; and immediately summoning up his courage, seated  Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 76.  Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:190. 55  Archibald Alison, Some Account of My Life and Writings: An Autobiography by the Late Sir Archibald Alison, ed. Lady Jane Alison, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), 244–45. See Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland, 131. 53 54

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himself calmly in the carriage, beside his confessor”.56 After his execution is complete, Alison gives us first Mignet’s evaluation of the King, and then, here, his own: In vain the malice of his enemies subjected Louis to every indignity; in vain the executioners bound his arms, and the revolutionary drums stifled his voice; in vain the edge of the guillotine destroyed his body, and his remains were consigned to unhallowed ground; his spirit has triumphed over the wickedness of his oppressors. From his death has begun a reaction in favour of order and religion throughout the globe. His sufferings have done more for the cause of monarchy than all the vices of his predecessors had undone.57

This uses the rhetorical device of anaphora to sanctify Louis’ memory and makes so bold a claim for that king’s significance that it even parallels his sufferings with those of Christ. By contrast, Carlyle’s portrait of the ancien régime disarmingly combines contempt, affection and despair. In June 1791, the French royal family attempted to flee the Revolution by escaping into the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) but were spotted and captured at Varennes-en-Argonne. In the process of recounting this episode, Carlyle suddenly turns to speak as if directly to the King himself. He exclaims: “O Louis; O hapless Marie-Antoinette, fated to pass thy life with such men! Phlegmatic Louis, art thou but lazy semi-animate phlegm, then, to the centre of thee?”58 After that frustrated quasi-spoken paragraph, Carlyle opens the next in a different tone, speaking this time to the reader: Alas, it was not in the poor phlegmatic man. Had it been in him, French History had never come under this Varennes Archway to decide itself.—He steps out; all step out. […] they walk, coolly back, over the Marketplace, to Procureur Sausse’s; mount into his small upper story; where straightway his Majesty “demands refreshments”. Demands refreshments, as is written; gets bread-and-cheese with a bottle of Burgundy; and remarks, that it is the best Burgundy he ever drank!59

 Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:528.  Alison, 1:530. 58  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 373. Part II, Book 4, Chapter 7: “The Night of Spurs”. 59  Carlyle, 373. 56 57

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The power of Carlyle’s prose comes here from the dramatic lurches in his and our field of view, from the galactic to the close-up. The panoramic effect produced across these two paragraphs comes in part from his repetition of terms. First we see that he is willing to call the King “phlegmatic” to his face and even to provoke him into action by extemporizing that image of “lazy semi-animate phlegm”, which turns the potential affirmation of a “phlegmatic” temperament into a playground taunt. A few moments later, however, it becomes a sad but undeniable truth, no longer to be debated but simply to be lamented: “the poor phlegmatic man” can think no further than his next bottle of Burgundy. He lacks the panoramic perspective that Carlyle possesses so overwhelmingly and has no sense of how his actions tip the scales of “the whole course of French History”.60 Carlyle reinforces this impression still further in the following pages. Even when Louis’ officers come to wait upon him, “the King can give no order, form no opinion; but sits there, as he has ever done, like clay on potter’s wheel; perhaps the absurdest of all pitiable and pardonable clay-­ figures that now circle under the Moon”.61 Here Louis loses even the “semi-animate” qualities he had as a piece of phlegm and becomes merel0y a lump of clay. Carlyle places him back into that cosmic context through his view of the world “circl[ing] under the Moon” but suggests that even when viewed in this capacious way, this is an exceptional circumstance and an exceptionally ill-suited holder of power. Carlyle’s use of panoramic perspective therefore acts in part to solidify his character studies and the conclusions he draws from them: if Louis looks like this from the proximity of direct dialogue and from the distance of the Moon, this must be his true nature. Carlyle is not universally scathing about all the actors of the French Revolutionary drama and occasionally transfers attention suddenly from the group to the individual. In his account of September 1792, when war was underway between revolutionary France and a Prussian alliance, Carlyle takes us to the battlefield of Valmy in the Argonne. Just as it seems like he is going to describe some military maneuvers, he changes his mind. These wheelings and movements in the region of the Argonne, […] let us, nevertheless, O Reader, entirely omit;—and hasten to remark two things: the first a minute private, the second a large public thing. Our minute ­private  Carlyle, 373.  Carlyle, 375. Part II, Book 4, Chapter 7: “The Night of Spurs”.

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thing is: the presence, in the Prussian host, in that war-game of the Argonne, of a certain Man, belonging to the sort called Immortal; […] This man’s name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He is Herzog Weimar’s Minister, come with the small contingent of Weimar; to do insignificant unmilitary duty here; very irrecognizable to nearly all! He stands at present, with drawn bridle, on the height near Saint-Menehould, making an experiment on the “cannon-fever;” having ridden thither against persuasion, into the dance and firing of the cannon-balls, with a scientific desire to understand what that same cannon-fever may be[.]62

He quotes from Goethe’s description of the sensations produced by the proximity of cannon-fire and then comments “This is the cannon-fever, as a World-Poet feels it.—A man entirely irrecognizable!” This passage comes in part from an overflowing idiosyncratic obsession—Carlyle’s adoration for the works and ideas of Goethe—but it also serves to remind us of the way in which our attention to events does not necessarily align with formal or official valuations of importance. The “minute private [thing]” is evidently to Carlyle of higher priority than the “large public thing”, the Battle of Valmy, even though it marked the first French victory of the Revolutionary Wars. That description of Goethe—“having ridden thither against persuasion, into the dance and firing of the cannon-balls”—might well also be a description of Carlyle immersing himself in the French Revolution in order to write a history of its “cannon-fever”. As historiographic tastes changed through the nineteenth century, Carlyle’s immersion in this narrative of dramatic and violent upheaval came to be seen by some as voyeuristic. By the late 1860s, Louis Raymond De Véricour (Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast) felt that Carlyle’s and Adolphe Thiers’ histories of the revolution both conveyed an “indifference to human sufferings, […] disregard of ordinary humanity […] they appear to have cultivated an intellectual taste for bloodshed; it stimulates their reverence”.63 While Linda Orr approaches these histories of the revolution from a very different (poststructuralist and Derridean) angle, she partially aligns with Véricour on this point. As she sees it,  Carlyle, 514. Part III, Book 1, Chapter 7: “September in Argonne”. Italics in original.  R. De Véricour, “The Study of History,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (December 1872): 19, https://doi.org/10.2307/3677900; R. De Véricour, The Study of History as a Branch of Education (Paper read before the Historical Society of Great Britain on 5th July 1869, n.d.), 13, accessed December 7, 2018. 62 63

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Historical writing of the nineteenth century either had to swallow the distasteful, the disgusting parts of the Revolution or cough them up. […] That they are attracted—flip side of revulsion—to what repels them shows in the energy of the writing. […] It is more likely that the nineteenth-century historians are less repulsed by the Revolution than we are by them.64

Orr stealthily turns round the voyeurism so that perhaps it is we who are the repulsed voyeurs of these nineteenth-century accounts, while they faced up the reality of what they were representing. The voyeurism lies not in the representation but in the reception. Carlyle is best remembered in the twenty-first century through his preoccupation with “Heroes and Hero-Worship” (the title of his 1840 lecture series). However, early Labour MPs recounted being inspired by Carlyle’s portrait of the French Revolution, which encouraged them to read its events and morals not “as a warning, but rather as a promise”.65 Despite his attachment to heroes, here Carlyle treats “collective forces as […] narrative agents”; he “treats the class makeup of the crowd as, epistemologically speaking, irrelevant”.66 In Melman’s description, Carlyle combined the panorama and the alleyway to aim at a “total history” that had not been attempted before.67 A focus on the suffering of the nameless masses is starkly visible at the opening of the second chapter of The French Revolution. Here Carlyle shifts focus from the ancien régime court to the vast majority of the population. With the working people, again it is not so well. Unlucky! For there are twenty to twenty-five millions of them. Whom, however, we lump together into a kind of dim compendious unity, monstrous but dim, far off, as the canaille; or, more humanely, as “the masses.” Masses, indeed: and yet, singular to say, if, with an effort of imagination, thou follow them, over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows;

64  Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1990), 21. 65  Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001), 42; Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 88. 66  Mark Allison, “The French Revolution Now; or, Carlyle’s Eternal Return,” Victorian Literature and Culture 50, no. 1 (2022): 209, 206. 67  Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 72.

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stands covered there with his own skin, and if you prick him he will bleed. … every unit of these masses is a miraculous Man, even as thyself art[.]68

He justifies social history by taking first a panoramic overview and then a zoomed-in—but hypothetical—evocation of any or every one of those individuals. Whereas comparable passages (in other Victorian contemporary histories I have discussed elsewhere) keep a distance from these “masses” under the banner of “the nation”, Carlyle’s narrative goes right inside the “hovels”, albeit in a hypothetical and anonymous way rather than through any specific named examples.69 The enormity of Carlyle’s lament here comes into relief when we compare his style again with that of Alison. These different historians had of course different aims, and Alison certainly did not set out to write a social history. He expresses pity for the “lower orders” in France, but never allows it to ruffle his writing’s classical poise. Let us look again at the sentence with which Alison opens his history’s second chapter: If the condition of the lower orders in France, anterior to the Revolution, is examined, it will not be deemed surprising that a convulsion should have arisen; and if humanity sees much to deplore in the calamities it produced, it will find much cause for consolation in the grievances it has removed.70

Here Alison acknowledges the terrible living conditions of the “lower orders in France”, but reassures his readers that those conditions are now much improved. This suggests that all historical occurrences, however unexpected or horrifying in the moment, have long-term advantages and disadvantages and, far from being condemned by the historian, are likely part of an overall Providential plan. By contrast, Carlyle uses the visual juxtapositions of panoramic perspective to remind his readers of the incongruity of suffering and oblivious enjoyment. Much later in the work and the revolution, describing the September massacres of 1792, he briefly but suddenly turns away from slaughter to comment: It is very curious to think what a City is. Theatres, to the number of some twenty-three, were open every night during these prodigies: while ­right-­arms  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 36. Part I, Book 2, Chapter 2: “Petition in Hieroglyphs”.  Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 130–35. 70  Alison, History of Europe during the French Revolution, 1833, 1:61. 68 69

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here grew weary with slaying, right-arms there were twiddledeeing on melodious catgut; at the very instant when Abbé Sicard was clambering up his second pair of shoulders, three-men high, five hundred thousand human individuals were lying horizontal, as if nothing were amiss.71

Here again we have the “dulness calmly snoring” that Asmodeus would have seen. The sublime and the ridiculous live side by side. But here the “sublime” is horrendous slaughter, while the comic onomatopoeia “twiddledeeing” is softened by the beauty that the “melodious catgut” of violin strings can produce. Carlyle is exorcized by the challenge of how one represents the most urgent and noisiest events in history, while also acknowledging the co-existence of the silent majority. This is perhaps expressed most poignantly toward the end of the work, where reflection on tallies of deaths (in his figures, the total of those guillotined add up to one 200th of those killed in the Seven Years War) lead him to encourage his readers to turn their minds to the suffering of poverty and destitution being experienced closer to home and in their present, as he was to foreground further in Past and Present. History, looking back over this France through long times, […] confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name Reign of Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds and Units; who shrieked and published, and made the world ring with their wail, as they could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The frightfullest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking ones, for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from century to century!72

The magnificence of his panoramic production comes partly in his evocation of action and emotion, voices and tumult, but it is crucially joined by constant recognition of its own fallibility: even his history writing is inevitably drawn to the most “speaking” periods of time. As Mark Allison argues, Carlyle’s radicalism lies in seeing the revolution not as an anomalous aberration but as a period that differs “only in degree”, not in kind, “from history-as-usual”.73 He acknowledges the huge galactic and social  Carlyle, The French Revolution, 501–2. Part III, Book 1, Chapter 6: “The Circular”.  Carlyle, 711–12. Part III, Book 7, Chapter 6: “Grilled Herrings”. 73  Allison, “The French Revolution Now; or, Carlyle’s Eternal Return,” 206. 71 72

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context in which this tumult is taking place. As Crary describes it, would­be panoramic views like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”—and as I would argue, like this one—reveal the “numbing disproportion between the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exterior world”.74 Even Carlyle knows his panorama can never be entirely all-encompassing.

Conclusions Historians remediated the perspective of panorama paintings and took it even further. They used a literary and textual version of panoramic perspective to generate a more complete and free-flying sense of overview. Panoramic perspective was not seen as necessary by classically minded historians such as Alison, but was enthusiastically taken up those of a Romantic bent such as Carlyle who reveled in cosmic leaps of perspective and changes of scale. In Alison’s narrative, precedent and transhistorical comparisons take the place of visual distance. It is because Carlyle rejects such easy aphorisms that his work needs panoramic perspective. Historicism’s emphasis on time-bound specificity is what leads Carlyle— and later writers including Thomas Hardy—to refuse temporal universalization. Romantic historicism requires a different kind of overview: the spatial overview of panoramic perspective. Any schematic alignment of overview with conventional elite history, and of immersion with history from below, breaks down in the nineteenth-­ century context. If anything, it was the other way round. Carlyle is very much capable of writing about historical figures as if he knows them well, doing so with affectionate or contemptuous epithets, and with the mockery of an old friend. He looks them in the face and brings them down to size. It is not so easy, however, to apply this style when depicting anonymous masses. When he writes about the “twenty-five millions” of French peasants, he tries to evoke them as individuals but for the most part is forced to take an anonymous overview. Melman concludes that Carlyle’s French Revolution cannot be described as “a social history, let alone as a history ‘from below’”, instead suggesting it “literally is people’s history ‘from above’”.75 A century and more before E.  P. Thompson and even 74  Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 2002, 23. 75  Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953, 78.

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longer before the invention of microhistory, detailed portrayals of individuals “from below” were really still the preserve of the historical novel. However, it is the alternation of “above” and “amid” that gives Carlyle’s work its power. He takes panoramic perspective to its full potential, swooping between states of distance and proximity, allowing him to make the most of these “twenty-five millions” and convert them into what Steinlight calls “sources of narrative energy”. She suggests this is the distinctive preserve of the novel genre and fictional characters, but Carlyle’s French Revolution shows that panoramic perspective enabled historians to embrace this energy too.

CHAPTER 4

The Napoleonic Wars from Near and Far: Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts

We have seen how panoramic perspective could be useful in Carlylean history writing. What about its uses in fiction? This chapter traces how Thomas Hardy approached panoramic perspective in his two fictions set during the Napoleonic Wars: The Trumpet-Major (1880) and The Dynasts (1904–08). In these works, he followed in Thomas Carlyle’s footsteps by alternating immersion and overview, but also went beyond Carlyle by formalizing the immersed and overview perspectives. The format of The Dynasts, a closet-drama partly in verse that Hardy termed an “epic-drama”, innovatively combines proximity and distance. Rather than lurching as Carlyle does between narratorial and free indirect discourse, Hardy uses the construct of stage performance (however hypothetical) to immerse us directly in dialogue, and he uses the bold notion of a spirit realm to assert the overview of a perfect hindsight. Sometimes we sit down within Napoleon and Josephine’s bedchamber or in a moldy cellar in Spain, and sometimes we float on a cloud with a cast of immortal Spirits, gaining access to an overview beyond any we have encountered in this study so far. The Dynasts suggests that through this combination of perspectives, we can gain insights that might otherwise have seemed impossible. This chapter brings those innovations into relief by comparing them with Hardy’s own earlier but insufficient approach to representing the Napoleonic Wars in The Trumpet-Major. In this novel, a tale of provincial Wessex life, the vagaries of a love-triangle romance plot are propelled © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_4

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forward but wrenched out of shape by the vagaries of that world war. The Trumpet-Major ponders (but never expands upon) a question that becomes the driving force of The Dynasts: What counts as historic? What the novel lacks in breadth and directness about the wars, The Dynasts more than compensates for. The first half of this chapter focuses on the two works’ representations of proximity and distance. The second half shows how radically The Dynasts puts us into the role of contemporary historians, partly through playing on readers’ prior knowledge of the wars and partly through characters’ self-consciousness about their era’s historic status, none more so than Napoleon himself.

Proximity and Distance Both The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts were the result of Hardy’s long-­ fermenting interest in the Napoleonic Wars and were fueled by eyewitness memories. Hardy had been fascinated by those wars ever since his childhood, and by the 1870s they lay at 60–70 years’ distance, beyond his own living memory but still within “communicative memory”, since others who had experienced them could recount to him their first-hand memories. The Trumpet-Major was enriched by “extensive acquaintance with soldiers of the old uniforms and long service”, by further talks with Chelsea pensioners in 1875, and by the textual research from newspapers, magazines and army publications that fill the “Trumpet-Major notebook”.1 As a result, Hardy explicitly frames the novel as the result of a collage of first-­ hand recollections passed down to him. In his preface for the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine “Wessex Novels” collected and revised edition, he describes the novel’s events as “an unexaggerated reproduction of the recollections of old persons well known to the author in childhood, but now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those scenes”.2 Early on in the narrative, Hardy interrupts an account of a party (held to celebrate the arrival of the military camp and the Miller’s trumpet-major son) with a metalepsis that explains: 1  Emma Clifford, “The ‘Trumpet-Major Notebook’ and The Dynasts,” The Review of English Studies 8, no. 30 (1957): 150; J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 638. 2  Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major, ed. Richard Nemesvari, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. Subsequent references will be given within the text.

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The present writer, to whom this party has been described times out of number by members of the Loveday family and other aged people now passed away, can never enter the old living-room of Overcombe Mill without beholding the genial scene through the mists of the seventy or eighty years that intervene between then and now. (42)

He sets up the scene specifically as the result of eyewitness testimonies, informally but personally given. Even though Hardy himself has never beheld that “genial scene”, it has been described to him so vividly that he cannot help visualizing it. Like any good historical fiction-writer, Hardy revivifies his material as communicative memory even as he solidifies it as cultural memory. By the time Hardy composed The Dynasts in the 1900s, the gap had become a full century and the Napoleonic Wars had slipped out of living memory, becoming amendable to narration as mythical cultural memory. In contrast with The Trumpet-Major’s personal and local approach, The Dynasts prominently features a cosmic version of panoramic perspective. Radically, this comes not from any eyewitness but from Hardy’s vision of how supernatural beings might view the wars. Regular interludes take place in the “Overworld” with dialogues between spirits, and the panoramic vistas emerge in extended stage directions, which function as descriptions for the mind’s eye. In the opening “Fore Scene”, the spirits look down to Earth and see Europe as a splayed suffering body. The passage is worth quoting in full: The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping [sic] like a backbone, and the branching mountain-­ chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-­ green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean. The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities.3

3  Thomas Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 20. Part I, Fore Scene.

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The opening image is notable for its distance from Hardy’s Wessex heartlands, its lack of Anglo-centrism (the British Isles are very much on the margins) and resistance to nationalism altogether. Borders are irrelevant here, and all of the dynasts are prioritizing their own interests over those of their people.4 The next and nearer view is notable in turn for the verbs it attributes to the people of Europe—“writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating”—which unlike the humanized geology of Europe with its “backbone”, turn its people into invertebrates, and suggests that their scale relative to events around them makes them as helpless as such species. These verbs also evoke the shared suffering of a unified organism, in an image that became central for Hardy from the 1880s onward. During Hardy’s lifetime, he was seen by some as pioneeringly modern and cosmopolitan, but by others as an overly Romantic provincial autodidact, governed by his emotions and not in control of his art.5 This latter view gained increasing sway in the decades after his death and was retroactively applied to The Dynasts, which was also critiqued from the opposite direction by Emma Clifford for not assimilating its research as unobtrusively as in The Trumpet-Major.6 By contrast, from the 1950s, critics began to view The Dynasts as “the natural sequel to the novels” and “the indispensable culmination of his work”.7 It is still less discussed than many of Hardy’s novels but has received increased attention in the past thirty years. Glen Wickens has seen it in Bakhtinian terms as heteroglossic and therefore fundamentally a novel; its polyphonic qualities are indeed impressive, though they make more sense (and are less surprising) when we read it— in Hardy’s chosen terms—as a play.8 More significant for this study, Shou-­ ren Wang, Isobel Armstrong and Herbert Tucker have, respectively, used The Dynasts to close their studies of nineteenth-century closet-drama, 4  As Jane Bownas shows, The Dynasts is critical of the “imperialistic” and “expansionist” politics of both Napoleon and Wellington. Jane L. Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Ashgate, 2012), para. 6.11. 5  J. I. M. Stewart, “Thomas Hardy,” in Eight Modern Writers, ed. F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobree, vol. 12, The Oxford History of English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 216; F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and Their Background (London: Macmillan, 1968), 110. 6  Clifford, “The ‘Trumpet-Major Notebook’ and The Dynasts,” 161. 7  Susan Dean, Hardy’s Poetic Vision in The Dynasts: The Diorama of a Dream (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), 9; R.  A. Scott-James, Thomas Hardy (London: Longmans, Green, 1951), 35. 8  Glen Wickens, Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

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poetry and epic.9 Those scholars have all seen The Dynasts as critiquing distantiation. Wang writes of the “inadequacy of the Spirits’ panoramic approach”, Armstrong reads the poem as implying “refusal of an overview” and Tucker sees it more precisely as “anti-spectacular”, a critique of “those who pretend to a commandingly detached overview”.10 I would argue, however, that the work is influenced by the twin spectacles of cinema and panorama. The period when Hardy wrote the work was proto-­ cinematic—and The Dynasts lends itself brilliantly to the future affordances of that medium—and panoramania was in full swing in the Napoleonic period he depicted. Tucker has specifically tied the drama’s “Overworld vantage” to its historical setting, suggesting that “looking down is The Dynasts’ way of looking back” and that “the heady superiority of his Overworld vantage […] resembles nothing so much as the superiority of perspective that comes with historical hindsight”.11 My discussion develops further the parallels that Tucker recognizes between spatial and temporal distance in Hardy’s epic-drama. I place Tucker’s insights in the dual context of the early-­ nineteenth-­century panorama craze and the late-nineteenth-century compilation ideal. I argue that Hardy’s use of the term “epic” to categorize The Dynasts signifies a faith, like the other panoramas in part I, in a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Even if no single part—or person— can have full intellectual overview of the whole, Hardy hopes that holding such a faith will enable people to feel a greater sense of cosmic unity. The cosmic perspective of The Dynasts pushes to greater extremes the doctrine of human insignificance that Hardy invokes in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) when he describes Tess standing “still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly”.12 He intends such images not only to awe and daunt us, but also to 9  Shou-ren Wang, The Theatre of the Mind: A Study of Unacted Drama in Nineteenth-­ Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 171–200; Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 472–77; Herbert F.  Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 584–601. 10  Wang, The Theatre of the Mind, 185; Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 474; Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910, 600. 11  Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910, 590. 12  Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 105. Phase the Third: XVI.

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remind us of human equality with everything else in the natural universe. After the Fore Scene’s image of “writhing” insect-like populations, recurrent similes view armies in similar ways. Napoleon’s army in retreat from Moscow in 1812 is to the Spirit of the Pities “An object like a dun-coloured caterpillar / … / Which, moving as a single monster might, / Is yet not one but many”.13 Although Hardy is careful to use similes rather than metaphors—it is “like a caterpillar” but not one—ruling out that species only brings us back to some other uncanny non-human “object” that is “not one but many”. When the tables are turned and the Russian army moves to invade France in 1814, that army looks very similar. It is “riband-­ shaped”, composed of “undulating columns [that] twinkle as if they were scaly serpents” like “strange dark patches in the landscape”, while the town of Mannheim in a fork between two rivers looks like “a human head in a cleft stick”.14 The grotesque defamiliarizes this spectacle, brings its imminent violence to the fore and reminds us that all of these different armies are really the same from a cosmic perspective. These comparisons between groups of people and invertebrate organisms go beyond ideological messages to epistemological ones. Hardy used the same imagery later in his Life of Thomas Hardy for a peaceful London crowd: past a certain level of density it “loses its character of an aggregate of countless units and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity, that takes the shape of the streets along which it has lain itself, and throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighbouring alleys”.15 J. Hillis Miller ties this transformed image of “aggregate” humanity to an 1891 essay of Hardy’s, which emphasized that “scientific realism” is (thankfully) impossible because “select or omit” is a vital part of the process of generating art from disorderly reality.16 Hardy evokes these figments of writhing humanity as examples of why complete compilation is never possible, since life does not follow encyclopedic principles. Instead, the occasional panoramic view can

13  Thomas Hardy, “The Dynasts, Part Third,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 42. Part 3 I.ix. 14  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Part Third,” 98. Part 3, Act IV.i. 15  Thomas Hardy and Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1965), 131. 16  J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1970), 256; Thomas Hardy, Life and Art: Essays, Notes and Letters Collected for the First Time, ed. Ernest Brennecke (New York: Greenberg, 1925), 87.

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offer brief glimpses of what overview would mean—a truth that would be incomplete without the close-up. The Dynasts is full of panoramas. Hardy deploys the precise term multiple times, including in his Preface, where he calls the work a “panoramic show”. 17 He thereby paves the way for some memorable scene-painting. At the end of Napoleon’s imperial coronation in Milan cathedral, [t]he exterior of the Cathedral takes the place of the interior, and the point of view recedes, the whole fabric smalling [sic] into distance and becoming like a rare, delicately carved alabaster ornament. The city itself sinks to miniature, the Alps show afar as a white corrugation, the Adriatic and the Gulf of Genoa appear on this and on that hand, with Italy between them, till clouds cover the panorama.18

Such descriptions play with the notion of this epic poem as a drama, inviting us to hold two images in our mind at once: a proto-cinematic aerial view of these landscapes themselves and then stage set or dioramic versions, with the cathedral a “carved alabaster ornament” and Alps made of ambiguously man-made “corrugated” material. These panoramas are not universal, however. This scene is cosmic rather than global: “clouds cover the panorama” after we pan out to the level of Europe. As the “Spirit Sinister” puts it, “we may as well give all attention thereto [Napoleon’s coronation], for the evils at work in other continents are not worth eyesight in comparison”.19 The implication here is not just that other continents are less “evil” at the time, but concomitantly that their events are less important. The panoramas that Hardy evokes are also not necessarily the 360° format we have focused on in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4. Often they are moving panoramas that scroll past us. As Maria Louisa, with “eyes red from recent weeping”, is taken to marry Napoleon, we watch her journey from Vienna into France. “The puny concatenation of specks being exclusively watched, the surface of the earth seems to move along in an opposite direction […] Vine-circled Stuttgart, flat Carlsruhe, the winding Rhine, storky Strassburg, pass in panorama beneath us as the procession is followed”.20 At other times, these so-called panoramas are closer to large concave paintings. At the city of Ulm, the site of an 1805  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 7.  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 59. Part 1, I.vi. 19  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 56. Part 1, I.vi 20  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 354. Part 2, V.5. 17 18

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battle between French and Austrian forces, we get “a prospect of the city from the east” and are told that “at the back of the scene, northward, rise the Michaelsberg heights; below stretches the panorama of the city and the Danube”.21 These references to “the back” and “below” do not indicate that the image extends round behind viewers’ backs, but rather that the mountains form a backdrop to the cityscape foreground. Yet further passages draw on the dissolving views of the diorama, as “the scene is lost behind sea-mist”, “sea-mist cloaks the perspective” or “the mountain mists close over”.22 The scene is always in flux and we are never really omniscient. As well as drawing together the several variants of nineteenth-century panoramas, Hardy’s spatial construction alternates between the panoramic, the cinematic and the theatrical.23 In Part I’s depiction of the gradual build-up to the Battle of Trafalgar, descriptions like “A courier arrives with dispatches, and enters the Emperor’s quarters … Napoléon comes out from his hut … and musingly proceeds towards an eminence commanding the Channel” are panoramic: note that Napoleon instinctively “proceeds towards an eminence” that gives him a commanding overview of the scene. They are also cinematic rather than theatrical in going far beyond what could fit on any early-twentieth-century stage set. A few lines later, by contrast, we are told: “Napoléon and Decrès advance to the foreground of the scene”. Here, suddenly, we are in a theater again, with an implied “upstage” and “downstage”, as well as the small-capital letters of the speaking characters to aid actors reading from a script. Thus, Hardy merges and alternates between panoramic, cinematic and theatrical precedents in creating his “epic-drama” that is at once of all those worlds and none. The final use of the term “panorama” within The Dynasts refers to something that is not visible at all: what the Spirit Ironic calls “a little moral panorama”. This turns out to be, in the build-up to the Battle of Ligny that itself preceded the Battle of Waterloo, a visionary march-past of all the men Napoleon’s campaigns have killed, “hundreds of thousands of  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 98, 107. Part 1, IV.ii; IV.v.  See Dean, Hardy’s Poetic Vision in The Dynasts: The Diorama of a Dream, 38. Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 66, 73, 235. (Part 1, II.2 ; Part 1, II.4; Part 2, II.1) 23  On Hardy as cinematic, see A. J. A. Waldock, Thomas Hardy and the Dynasts (Australian English Association, 1933); John Wain, “Introduction,” in The Dynasts; an Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon, by Thomas Hardy (London; New  York: Macmillan; St. Martin’s Press, 1965), i–xxxvii. 21 22

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skeletons and corpses in various stages of decay”, which “rise from various battlefields” and “gaze reproachfully at him”. Notably, while they include “his intimate officers”, this crowd are not solely French: it is truly a panorama of the war’s dead.24 In his “epic-drama” Hardy glories in pushing beyond the boundaries of the visible world to express what had not seemed possible within the realist or naturalist novels of his earlier career.25 By contrast, The Trumpet-Major contains just one truly panoramic scene and to different effect. In this episode, the heroine Anne Garland looks out to sea from Portland Bill, where of the 360° horizon, “two hundred and fifty were covered by waves, the coup d’oeil including the area of troubled waters known as the Race, where two seas met to effect the destruction of such vessels as could not be mastered by one” (290). In the ensuing slow but yearning-filled scene, we watch the passing of the ship Victory, which conveniently carries both the historic Admiral Nelson and the unhistoric (and fictional) but emotionally significant wayward hero Robert Loveday. The ship is elusively described as “like a phantom … sometimes her aspect was that of a large white bat, sometimes that of a grey one” (292). As the view becomes foreshortened near the horizon, the ships “assumed the form of an egg on end” and eventually “contracted to the proportion of a feather” (292). Eventually, “[s]he was now no more than a dead fly’s wing on a sheet of spider’s web; and even this fragment diminished” (293). These metaphors evoke both the extreme yearning of those left on land—to follow such a tiny and distant “fragment” as their best hope of communion with the beloved—and the fragility of these military endeavors. In contrast to The Dynasts’ equivalent similes and metaphors, the strangeness of these ones is partially explained away by being focalized through Anne’s vision and that of the elderly sailor who watches with her. Whereas in this novel such images encourage us to reflect on the fallibility of human perception, The Dynasts forces us to confront the fallibility of all human military endeavors. Most of the time, The Trumpet-Major puts us close-up to the action among localized and apparently insignificant personages, encouraging a question that The Dynasts later asks much more insistently: Who counts as historic? Mid-Victorian retrospective, provincial and realist novels—by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, among  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Part Third,” 184. Part 3, VI.3.  See Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1985), 241, 302. 24 25

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others—suggest that even obscure and apparently insignificant figures could be important in their sphere and have a “diffusive” effect on those beyond it.26 This tradition provided Hardy with a template to work with in his own retrospective, provincial, naturalist fiction. We see repeatedly in The Trumpet-Major how the Napoleonic Wars affect the day-to-day lives of its obscure protagonists, and in the character of Captain Hardy (who Thomas Hardy believed was an ancestor), we observe how Wessex people can overlap with history and become historic themselves. There is at least one wrong way to believe oneself historic. From the beginning of the novel (as is also the case in Tess), Hardy mocks those who claim historic status from false quarters: lineage. Miller Loveday echoes characters from earlier retrospective provincial fictions—George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “My Lady Ludlow”—who are excessively proud of their ancestry.27 As in their cases, his pride is founded in delusion. While “his ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and De La Zouche”, “owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members were not recorded during the Middle Ages”; in other words, all we know, as with anyone else, is that he was the product of a perpetual line of forebears. This mockery is heightened when Hardy adds: “It was also ascertained that Mr Loveday’s great-grandparents had been eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen” (16). The implication is that anyone could say the same—but that most people resist doing so. The opening chapters of The Trumpet-Major offer a wealth of commentary on the historical status of its fiction and of individuals’ perception of their place in history. The opening pages describe Anne at work in making a hearth-rug, a “tedious task” as the narrator admits. “Nobody was expected to finish a rug within a calculable period, and the wools of the beginning became faded and historical before the end was reached” (9). This rug gives us a miniature glimpse of the ever-changing (if cyclical) nature of human endeavor and, though in jest, suggests that it does not take long for something recent to feel distant and “historical”. Only a few sentences later we are told that the mill-pond’s overflowing water “was stealing away, like Time, under the dark arch, to tumble over the great slimy wheel within” (9). Both these references offer up an epic and  See Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapter 8.  For discussion of this trope in those earlier novels, see Kingstone, “Human-Animal Elision”. 26 27

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existential view of human history and mortality, only to bathetically undercut it almost immediately (is it really orthodox to think of the afterlife as a “great slimy wheel”?). These preoccupations peter out as the plot gets underway, and the focus turns to the long and winding quest for the hand of Anne Garland. The trumpet-major John Loveday and his more dashing brother Robert vie for Anne’s affections and fidelity, in what J.  Hillis Miller and Richard Nemesvari view as “essentially timeless” concerns: “the complicated antagonisms between desire and fulfilment”.28 The bulk of the novel, perhaps like the bulk of life, is spent focusing on more pressing and immediate questions than those opening ones about historicity. Hardy returns to reflect on historical location again at the very end of the novel. Here, the narrator interrupts the trumpet-major and friends’ jovial farewells, with the exclamation: But, alas, for that! Battles and skirmishes, advances and retreats, fevers and fatigues, told hard on Anne’s gallant friends in the coming time. Of the seven upon whom these wishes were bestowed five, including the trumpet-­ major, were dead men within the few following years, and their bones left to moulder in the land of their campaigns. (350)

The very next sentence is “John lingered behind”. Because of the preceding narratorial incursion, that initially reads as ambiguous—is it an existential or simply descriptive statement? Did John haunt his birthplace or just stay to say goodbye?—before we are resituated in the narrative present at the mill. The non-chronological authorial intervention could easily have been placed as the final paragraph of the novel but is instead turned into an interlude. It joltingly reminds us of the entire novel’s retrospective set-up, asking us to see it in a larger frame than the one of dalliances and rivalries that form the majority of its immediate focus. For much of the novel, Hardy focuses on what his protagonists (and perhaps intended readers) care most about: the romance plot. At the beginning and end, however, he forces us into self-consciousness.

28  The quote is from Richard Nemesvari, “Introduction,” in The Trumpet-Major, by Thomas Hardy, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), xv. See also Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, 144.

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We Are All Contemporary Historians By contrast with The Trumpet-Major’s primarily close-up perspective, The Dynasts revels in distance. Through doing so, Hardy tests out its value and whether it necessarily provides overview. At times he even forces us into the frustrating position of a distant spectator, so that we are left to yearn for particulars along with the scene’s inhabitants. In Part II, we experience the 1809 Battle of Wagram from the perspective of Emperor Francis of Austria and his officers. Despite their nominal positions of power, they each glean only snippets of information about the progress of the fighting: an officer reports that “the French have shifted, sire”, to which Francis replies, “But I am advised / By oral message that the Archduke Charles, / Since the sharp strife last night, has mended, too, / His earlier dispositions”. They then all “scrutinize through their [magnifying lens] glasses the positions and movements of the Austrian divisions”.29 Standing in a position analogous to contemporary historians, they look from afar, hoping thereby to have the distanced overview (and relative safety) that witnesses and combatants in the midst of the battle decidedly lack. Ironically, as a result they are hampered by their lack of proximate detail and desperately reach for microscopic particulars. However, even a position far behind the front line (so far that you do not know what is going on) is not necessarily enough to keep you safe. The locus of history moves. In the case of the scene at Wagram, before long a minister comes forward to say that “since the front and flower of all our force / Is seen receding to the Bisamberg, / These walls no longer yield safe shade for you, / Or facile outlook”—potentially “Bonaparte himself, / […] may intrude beneath this very roof”.30 The supposedly panoramic distance is not distant enough, and they have to retreat. The rulers can choose between proximity and safety, and the halfway option they initially choose turns out to offer neither insight nor sufficient protection, so instead they opt for the latter. Hardy thus wryly ridicules the idea that insight can be had without immersion. Hardy depicts his characters in this state of nervous partial information because in The Dynasts he is interested in representing how history is made. Rumors abound; people do not always know what is going on. Among those on Earth, only Napoleon has the overarching long view, and  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 302–3. Part II, IV.iii.  Hardy, 311. Part II, IV.iii.

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it is sometimes wrong, as I explore further below. The Spirits, by contrast, as Harold Orel delineates, are “never bewildered” and have much greater knowledge than their precursor the Greek chorus.31 The Overworld offers in Susan Dean’s words a “platform set back in space far enough to take in the world’s wide panorama”. She describes it further as “the standpoint of artificial intelligence looking back on the past to find some meaning emergent in the experience”.32 That sounds to me a lot like the perspective of overview that everyone in this book has been seeking: the perspective of the ideal historian. Hardy persistently requires us to consider ourselves in the position of Napoleonic contemporaries and view these events as contemporary history, but to see them from a longer timeframe than was yet available to his early-twentieth-century readers. With characteristic irony, he pushes us toward this approach via the callous comments of the Spirit Sinister (who tends to be a foil for the more sensible and sensitive commentary of the other Spirits). At one point, Sinister declares: “My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. So I back Bonaparte for the reason that he will give pleasure to posterity”.33 This pre-empts and caricatures a common approach to history that sees it as primarily a story and especially as a “rollicking good yarn”. To anyone reading The Dynasts, however, it seems a strange view of what history is supposed to be and what it is for. Tucker declares that “the poem pits an acknowledgement of history’s pastness as res gestae against the challenge of history’s incompletion as a work in progress”.34 I would like to develop Tucker’s observation, proposing that Hardy not only demonstrates this through the choric spirits of the Overworld, but enables his human characters (and readers) to reflect upon the issue too. From the preface onward, where Hardy asks the reader to bring their “foreknowledge” to fill in the gaps in his drama, he repeatedly draws on his readers’ latent knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars.35 Dean describes the iconic set-pieces in The Dynasts as “‘historic’, which is to say, they

31  Harold Orel, “The Dynasts: Hardy’s Contribution to the Epic Tradition,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), para. 36.36. 32  Dean, Hardy’s Poetic Vision in The Dynasts: The Diorama of a Dream, 24, 29. 33  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 80. Part 1, II.v. 34  Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910, 587. 35  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 7.

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satisfy our expectation, rather than startle or surprise it”.36 In some ways, therefore, Hardy does fill a rather familiar role in this work, by repeating though reframing a familiar and celebrated narrative of British history. At other times, however, he forces his readers to re-evaluate that latent knowledge. After Napoleon relates to us his campaign plans to defeat the Hapsburgs and take control of Vienna, the Chorus of the Years comments: It will be called, in rhetoric and rhyme, As son to sire succeeds, A model for the tactics of all time; “The Great Campaign of that so famed year Five,” By millions of mankind not yet alive.37

Napoleon seems at times to barely care what his own soldiers think of him (they are replaceable). Instead, his real judges are those of the future: he constantly has an eye to posterity. By contrast, by putting in quotation marks this title of “Great Campaign”, Hardy forces us to consider how we might be swept along by Napoleon’s charisma to view these victories as “Great” without considering their process and implications. He also forces us as readers to be aware of our advantageous hindsight: we know which of Napoleon’s campaigns did succeed and which did not. That reflexive notion of the Napoleonic Wars as something that posterity will remember is also voiced by Napoleon himself, though his assumptions on this do not go unchallenged. When he meets with Queen Louisa of Prussia at Tilsit on the River Niemen (in East Prussia), they engage in some light conversation. We get the following exchange: Napoléon (after a silence) And how at Memel do you sport with time? Queen Sport? I!—I pore on musty chronicles And muse on usurpations long forgot, And other historied dramas of high wrong! Napoléon Why con not annals of your own rich age? They treasure acts well fit for pondering.  Dean, Hardy’s Poetic Vision in The Dynasts: The Diorama of a Dream, 18.  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 90. Part 1, III.i.

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Queen I am reminded too much of my age By having had to live in it. May Heaven Defend me now, and my wan ghost anon, From conning it again!38

Napoleon acts as the advocate of contemporary history—channeling the view that the Spirit Sinister had voiced previously—but the Queen tartly questions the value of viewing one’s own age with such dispassion or admiration when one is also being obliged to experience it. For her, history is a source of ammunition and strength: the present does not serve this function for her as it does for the triumphant Bonaparte. Turning away from the rulers to their citizens, Hardy emphatically shows us both sides of war’s glinting coin. More than once, we read one scene of excitement about imminent warfare, followed by another that leaps past the ensuing battle to show the resultant suffering in retreat. In Part II, for instance, the end of Act II gives us a “dumb show” panoramic vision of the Battle of Vimeiro (Vimeiro in Portuguese), which produces a British victory insofar as forcing a French retreat. The following scene, however (opening Act III), comes from the perspective of five deserters from the British army. They are hiding in a grimy cellar and looking out at a moving panorama of the now-retreating British army battling through “yellow mud that lies half knee-deep”.39 In this scene, the retreating army and the deserters are equally devoid of any idealistic sentiment. The sergeant marching past “has a racking cough” that “is wasting away his life”, and the best he can muster to motivate his soldiers is the black-humored “If you die to-day you won’t have to die to-morrow”.40 In the course of the scene, one of the deserters find that the woman he “swore to marry” an hour earlier has just silently died; pillagers outside draw lots and one is executed by firing squad; corpses are dropped off baggage-wagons since “Tis no use straining the horses”; and another deserter’s attempt at jovial singing exposes their hiding place and gets them dragged off to join the march.41 We get a similar pattern at the next join between Acts. Act III.v shows a Viennese café scene with unnamed citizens fired up with patriotism and  Hardy, 229. Part II, I.viii.  Hardy, 266. Part 2, III.i. 40  Hardy, 268. Part 2, III.i. 41  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 269. Part 2, III.i. 38 39

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looking forward to assumed victory. The scene ends with a joint cheer of “Huzza! Right so! Good! Forwards! God be praised!”.42 The very next scene (IV.i), on “a road out of Vienna”, shows how premature were those assumptions. The ladies of the Austrian royal family (including the future Empress Marie Louise) trundle along rutted rainy roads away to the city of Buda in flight from Napoleon, understandably “gloomy” at even these comparatively mild consequences of defeat. What Hardy shows us so painfully here and repeatedly through The Dynasts, as does Tolstoy in War and Peace (1869), could be described as the systole and diastole of delusion and reality, the ideals required to drive an army into battle followed by the grim reality of injury and squalor.

Napoleon Napoleon is a perfect closing case-study to show how The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts put us in different positions in relation to contemporary history. The fantastical bogeyman figure of “Boney” lurks around the edges of The Trumpet-Major, where we learn early on that “at this time there were two arch-enemies of mankind—Satan as usual, and Buonaparte, who had sprung up and eclipsed his elder rival altogether” (11). “Boney” is however a slippery symbol, and even elsewhere within The Trumpet-­ Major, he becomes a figure of familiar fun, a Punch and Judy character who exists to frustrate our best-laid plans. Old miser Derriman complains that “what with the French, and what with my nephew Festus, I assure ye my life is nothing but wherrit from morning to night”, and fears theft equally “by Boney or Festus” (117). The jumbled equivalence of these two enemies reminds us how much more pressing immediate and known threats feel, even at times of the greatest global upheaval. “Boney” may have more clout overall, but the thoughtless nephew Festus looms as large because he is so much closer. In The Dynasts, rather differently, we meet Napoleon as an individual, sometimes humanized and sometimes defamiliarized. We see him in private first with Josephine and later with Marie and their son, in diplomatic mode as above with Queen Louisa of Prussia and in military mode with his generals and armies. These scenes show him to be a flawed figure—his casting off of Josephine is particularly callous (Part 2, V.ii)—but no devil. However, at other times Hardy forces us to observe him from afar. Before  Hardy, 295. Part 2, III.v.

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the Battle of Ligny, the stage directions tell us: “Something dark is seen to be advancing over the horizon by Fleurus, about three miles off. It is the van of Napoleon’s army, approaching to give battle”.43 On this occasion, the “something dark” mimics the perspective of the anti-French allies: Prussian Field-Marshal Blucher “is intently watching” but only gradually deciphers the approaching troops. Only once Wellington arrives, and the two generals climb a windmill together for a more elevated vantage point, do they gain they “clear” view they need.44 Before the 1809 Battle of Wagram, which proved a decisive victory for the French, but which lost many lives, we are told in heightened and mysterious gothic terms that “From bridge to bridge and back again a gloomy-­ eyed figure stalks, as it has stalked the whole night long, with the restlessness of a wild animal. Plastered with mud, and dribbling with rain-water, it bears no resemblance to anything dignified or official. The figure is that of Napoléon, urging his multitudes over”.45 Here Hardy withholds crucial information until the end in a way that would not be necessary for mere stage directions. Instead, it turns the prose of the “dumb show” scenes into suspenseful narrative and briefly turns Napoleon into the monster we (mostly) know him not to be. By contrast, in Napoleon’s final blank-verse speech at the grim and exhausted end of what would come to be known as the Battle of Waterloo, when he finally admits defeat, he startlingly compares himself to Christ. Hardy starts by elaborating Napoleon’s famous comment about retrieving the French crown from the mud: I found the crown of France in the mire And with the point of my prevailing sword I picked it up! But for all this and this I shall be nothing…. To shoulder Christ from out the topmost niche In human fame, as once I fondly felt, Was not for me. I came too late in time To assume the prophet or the demi-god, A part past playing now. My only course To make good showance to posterity Was to implant my line upon the throne.  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Part Third,” 189. Part 3, VI.v.  Hardy, 189. Part 3, VI.v. 45  Hardy, “The Dynasts, Parts First & Second,” 300. Part II, IV.ii. 43 44

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And how shape that, if now extinction nears? Great men are meteors that consume themselves To light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour.46

The “this and this” is both visual—gesturing across a blasted battlefield—and temporal, encouraging us to cast our minds across the whole chronology of The Dynasts and beyond. The curtailed scansion of the following line is all the more despairing in that context, encouraging us into sympathy with the tragic hero. But in the very next line, the reader is again shocked (and perhaps appalled) by Napoleon’s sheer chutzpah. Ultimately, he seems to suggest that achieving greatness equal to Christ’s is a period-­ specific opportunity: modernity was “too late in time” to be received as a “prophet”, and it was only as a dynast that Napoleon could aim to survive into “posterity”. This whole sequence reminds us of the doubleness of history: Napoleon is both “burnt-out” as a human being and nonetheless will survive into “posterity” as a historical figure—he both shall and shall not “be nothing”. Victorian provincial novelists’ vision that everyone counts as “historic” is thrown into question in Hardy’s later work by the specter of the Immanent Will. Can anyone have independent and lastingly significant agency if everyone is, in Dean’s words, “a puppet of the Will”?47 The exact identity and nature of Hardy’s notion of the Immanent Will emerges only gradually and sporadically to the reader of The Dynasts. While it is sometimes represented through the image of a brain, the Will itself (as Dean admirably traces) is not in fact a consciousness, and it only governs automatically, which might suggest that free will itself is completely absent. J. O. Bailey suggested that in The Dynasts the “dynasts” are the villains, while “the suffering peoples are ‘puppets’”,48 but in a further irony, everyone in the drama is a puppet of the Immanent Will. However, as Hardy suggests in poems such as “Waiting Both” and “Proud Songsters”, the Immanent Will itself is made up of all living organisms: not long ago, the birds we hear (and implicitly we too) were “only particles of grain, / And earth, and air, and rain”. Whatever the Immanent Will is, it not only suffuses all matter but is also shaped by all matter.

 Hardy, “The Dynasts, Part Third,” 249. Part 3, VII.ix  Dean, Hardy’s Poetic Vision in The Dynasts: The Diorama of a Dream, 178. 48  Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, 640. 46 47

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Conclusions In The Trumpet-Major, the Napoleonic Wars impact from afar the lives and loves of the characters but happen out of sight. The narrative focus on Anne Garland herself, and her prevaricating preference from the eponymous trumpet-major to his brother and back, encourages us to see the characters’ own actions as determining their fates. Apart from that one memorable scene at Portland Bill, the scale of vision is at the local and individual level. By contrast, in The Dynasts Hardy glories in panoramic perspective, using it to depict and grotesquely defamiliarize human warfare from a cosmic viewpoint. The real power of this “epic-drama”, however, comes from the way that he repeatedly juxtaposes that view with the up-close bathos of the aftermath of battle. He demonstrates—à la Stendhal’s accidental hero Fabrice at Waterloo in La Charteuse de Parme (1839), but on a wider canvas—that those experiencing history in the making do not necessarily experience it as history. Napoleon is unique in attaining and declaring overview, and even he is ultimately proved wrong. Thanks to a combination of hindsight and Hardy’s glorious imagination, as readers of The Dynasts we achieve an overview superior to Napoleon’s. And we achieve it, as ever, through the alternating combination of immersion and distance. While The Dynasts has been seen as the most experimental of Hardy’s works, pointing forward to the stylistic innovations of Modernism, Hardy’s use of the impossibly elevated panoramic perspective actually roots it deeply in the nineteenth century and makes it a relative chronological outlier in holding on to the panoramic model of overview.49 The compilation had become the predominant route to overview by the time Hardy was writing, but his work rejects some of that model’s implications even while exploring others. He resisted its dual anti-­narrative and would-be scientific properties. He also resists the compilation’s potential tendency to aggregate examples and collapse them into one another. Instead, and more like the compilations we will explore in Part II, the components of The Dynasts—130 scenes and a broad array of characters and settings—are not interchangeable. Napoleon and Wellington may partially be “equivalents of one another” in a riposte to nationalism, but 49  Scholars who have viewed The Dynasts as proto-modernist include Armstrong, Victorian Poetry; John Paul Riquelme, “The Modernity of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 204–23.

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Hardy is all too conscious of the power differential involved in all these dynamics and between these military leaders and those deserters in the cellar.50 The mosaic of pieces in The Dynasts does not aggregate or amalgamate into the Overworld overview—instead, they sit in firmly irreducible dialectic. As this chapter and the previous one have shown, therefore, Carlyle and Hardy chafe against the detachment that can come with hindsight, at the same time as they yearn for such elevated distance. They share with each other (and with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as I show elsewhere) a determination to find an overview that itself enables immersion.51 Carlyle generates an imaginatively expanded temporal distance from events through his would-be cosmic perspective, while in Hardy’s case he is looking back at the Napoleonic Wars from a much greater chronological distance. For both writers, immersion is not so much an inescapable inevitability as an ethical and aesthetic choice.

 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 472.  Helen Kingstone, “Panoramic perspective in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh: overview through immersion,” in preparation. 50 51

PART II

Transition: Between Panoramas and Compilations

CHAPTER 5

Photography Remediated in the Crimean War: Illustration, Exhibition and Collection

At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the panorama form had diversified. Robert Burford’s Leicester Square Panorama was mostly displaying landscapes, but commissioned panoramas of British military actions as and when they took place.1 Major cities housed panorama rotundas, but scroll-­ based “moving panoramas” also toured provincial towns.2 And photography was beginning to be used as source material for panoramas. Photographs could help to offer precision about details, which would then be distilled into the unified painting. However, the affordances of photography also raised the possibility of an alternative: rather than synthesizing and remediating photographs into panoramas, perhaps it would be more informative, or more authentic, or more immediate, simply to compile and keep multiple photographs. In this chapter I trace the mid-nineteenth-­century transition from a panoramic model of overview to a compilatory one. This analysis focuses on British attempts to gain overviews during the Crimean War (1853–1856), which saw both a revival of panoramas’ representation of military events and the first ever war photography.  These include an 1841 panorama of the bombardment of St Jean d’Acre (which had taken place in 1840), one in 1842 of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), and one in 1842 of Kabul, during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–1842). 2  Plunkett, “Moving Panoramas”; Plunkett and Kember, Picture Going: Popular Visual Shows 1820–1914. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_5

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Twentieth-century scholars of photography interpreted it as a break with the past and therefore studied it mostly through technological innovations and individual photographers.3 By contrast, this chapter follows more recent scholars in demonstrating the “intermediality” of early photography, as a medium that both was shaped by and contributed to panoramic painting and became the basis for compilations.4 A medium “is always born twice” according to André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, and having developed the theory on the case study of cinema, they have recently applied it to photography; Mary Warner Marien similarly talks of the “first” and “second invention of photography”.5 They emphasize that technological breakthroughs are unlikely to gain automatic recognition or acceptance and show that there is typically an interval of a decade or more before even successful technologies are taken up by the public or institutionally recognized as autonomous. My research attends to the intermediate period in this process, between the 1839 invention and “second birth” of the photographic medium.6 During this period, Gaudreault and Marion suggest, the “technological innovation is used to give new life to existing cultural practices and series, under whose authority this technology places itself”.7 This chapter argues that photography held that position in relation to existing panoramic media, being used “to amplify already well-established cultural practices” rather than as a “new paradigm” in and of itself.8 Panoramas were not just precursors to photography: the two co-existed, were mutually informing and even 3  Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present [1937; 1949; 1982] (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009); Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). 4  Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation”; Gabriele Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality: Literature - Image - Sound - Music (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015). 5  André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium Is Always Born Twice…”, Early Popular Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (2005): 3–15; André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “The Double-Birth Model Tested against Photography,” in Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2018), 191–204; Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th edition (London: Laurence King, 2014), 23. 6  Historians of photography identify a range of significant dates in the development of photographic technology, but 1839 is when both Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot made significant breakthroughs. 7  Gaudreault and Marion, “The Double-Birth Model Tested against Photography,” 191, 193. They also term this second birth an “advent”. 8  Gaudreault and Marion, 192.

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co-dependent. The great London panorama rotundas of Leicester Square and the Regent’s Park Colosseum both closed down in quick succession in 1863, but a new Royal London Panorama opened on Leicester Square in 1865, and on the continent, the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) hastened a revival in both countries. This makes any succession model inadequate. Instead, there was a period of several decades during which both co-­ existed, in which early photography was often compared to and used as source material for panoramas. It did not straightforwardly supersede its predecessor, but in fact temporarily heightened panoramas’ claims to verisimilitude. New media do not straightforwardly replace older ones, but continue to be used and adapted.9 As Jan von Brevern puts it, “old and new media do not just follow and replace each other; rather, they emulate and reconfigure one another”.10 One way in which this happens is via exchange: Ann Bermingham has shown how panoramas were modeled on landscape- and history painting, but that these genres also adopted panoramas’ scale and style; similarly, early photographs tried to look like paintings, and painters increasingly prized verisimilitude.11 However, stylistic innovations can also predate the technologies we now most associate with them. Jonathan Crary argued that embodied spectatorship predated photography, and Peter Galassi argued that pre-existing late-eighteenth-century artistic conventions already had a “photographic gaze” that focused on verisimilitude, as advertisements for early panoramas attest.12 Here I show that in the 1840s and 1850s, photography was often used as source material for

9  David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2008). 10  Jan Von Brevern, “Two or Three Things Photography Did to Painting,” in Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2018), 106. See also Gabriele Balbi, “Old and New Media: Theorizing Their Relationship in Media Historiography,” in Theorien Des Medienwandels, ed. Susanne Kinnebrock and Christian Schwarzenegger (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2015), 231–49. 11  Bermingham, “Landscape-O-Rama: The Exhibition Landscape at Somerset House and the Rise of Popular Landscape Entertainments.” Roger Fenton’s and James Thomson’s photographs of exotic fruit sought to replicate the tradition of still-life painting. See James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Picturing History (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 24–25. 12  Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12.

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painted and printed media: panoramas, history paintings and engravings for newspapers and books. This chapter poses the following question: In what ways did a range of stakeholders in the mid-nineteenth century (painters, newspaper staff, exhibitors and collectors) envisage photography serving as contemporary-­ historical evidence?13 I therefore reflect on how photographers’, painters’, journalists’ and autobiographers’ respective aspirations to authenticity are inflected by realist codes of representation. Rachel Teukolsky has recently proposed four realist modes used by visual media at this time, including in the Crimean War. These are the “descriptive” (“indexical” such as in mapping), the “authentic” (as in the “sincere truth of an eyewitness”), the “everyday” (the “mundane, routine” lives of often working-class characters) and the “plausible” (which “affirms what an audience already expects of the real”).14 Examining adjacent media to those discussed by Teukolsky, I show how these were combined in the intermedial environment of Crimean news. I find that rather than images—or indeed written accounts—being firmly grounded in any single mode, in practice they shifted between modes as they were remediated into new forms and genres. Media Studies scholar Henry Jenkins used the term “participatory culture” in discussing transmedia Convergence Culture (2006), to displace “older notions of passive media spectatorship”.15 Since he focuses solely on the recent twenty-first century, it is not clear whether he thinks the “passive” model applies to “older” timeframes as well as to previous scholarship. But as nineteenth-century material shows, participatory and dynamic intermedia were active and thriving throughout that period.16 Susan Sontag famously argued in the 1970s that photographs generate voyeurism, but in 2003 she revised that earlier claim and instead championed the medium’s distancing effects, suggesting that “standing back […] 13  Jennifer Tucker asked scholars to consider how we should use photography as historical evidence, a question my chapter builds upon. Jennifer Tucker, “Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Inquiry,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 1–8. 14  Rachel Teukolsky, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 85. 15  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 16   See Swidzinski, “Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London”; Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ann M.  Hale, “2014 VanArsdel Prize Essay: W.  T. Stead and Participatory Reader Networks,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 1 (2015): 15–41.

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frees us for observation and for elective attention”.17 In Sontag’s revised reading, photography can be a means to achieve a valuable overview. This chapter attends to the interplay between different ways of achieving overview through photography, as both photographer and audience. The first and longest section shows that the panoramic model of overview was still prevalent into the 1840s and 1850s and shaped the ways photographs were taken and used in remediated forms in the Crimean War. I then turn to consider how photography could deploy compilation methods to its advantage in what we would now call photo-montage; lastly, I trace how photographs themselves began to be combined into compilations. I show that this shift was less about changes in photographic technique, style or composition, than about a growing trust that what the medium showed was authoritative and transparent. Through these compilations, photography came to be seen as data, the subject of Part II.

Photography and Panoramas in the Crimean War In what ways did news, photography and panoramic painting interact in the first two decades of photography’s invention? This section shows how these forms all came into contact during the Crimean War of 1853–56, the first to be photographed and to be mediated into news at unprecedented speed via new telegraphy systems. Here I examine how photographs (but also sketches and written accounts) were used as source material for wood engravings in The Illustrated London News and for full-­ scale panoramas of the war. I take as a case study Roger Fenton’s photographs of the war, which were remediated into news, history painting, exhibitions and finally collections. I compare his account of his experiences in the Crimea with the British-Jamaican nurse and hotelier Mary Seacole’s account of hers, as well as with a distinctive panoramic painting of the war by history-painter Thomas Barker. To understand how these media interacted, we need to start with the Illustrated London News. This first regular weekly illustrated newspaper was founded in 1842 by Henry Ingram, with Frederick William Naylor Bayley as editor, and master engravers who included Henry Vizetelly, Ebenezer Landells, Frank Leslie and George Stiff. It carved out a place for detailed, photographic-style illustrations of specific recent events (what Brian Maidment refers to as “representational” and “pictorial” modes), as  Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), 106.

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opposed to the long-standing but non-realist tradition of woodcuts for broadside ballads and the unstamped press.18 With its relatively high price of 6d. (later 5d.), ILN was aimed squarely at the middle classes and promised to supply informative but non-threatening, respectable visual imagery of topical interest—what publisher Charles Knight later called “endless repetition” in which “the scenery is varied; the actors are the same”.19 The first issue opened with an address by Bayley promising that “should the pen ever be led into fallacious argument the pencil must at least be oracular with the spirit of truth”.20 This statement was either naïve or disingenuous, as the Illustrated London News’s processes show the newspaper’s illustrations to be the products of a complex process of remediation. Illustrated London News illustrations and panoramas had surprisingly similar production processes. For one, the illustrations were typically based on both image and text. Just as battle panoramas were often composed from sketches of the battlefield, plus eyewitness accounts from soldiers, ILN illustrations were often made from rough sketches (or later photographs), “aided by descriptive notes”.21 The text of panorama programs was as vital a component as the painting itself, and the same was true for the letterpress text that ILN used to gloss their engraved images. ILN also echoed panoramas in its relation to novelty. Just as panoramas drew on pre-existing sketches of a place and combined them with new accounts of events to generate “topical landscapes” (see Chap. 2), so did ILN. The inaugural issue in May 1842 featured not a single image “from firsthand sources”.22 The master engraver Henry Vizetelly later recounted in his autobiography how for pre-announced events “such as a royal journey, a great anti-corn law meeting, a grand official banquet, or the laying of the foundation-stone of some notable public building”, “an artist was sent to

18  Brian Maidment, “Illustration,” in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 108. 19  Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 54; Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, vol. 3 (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1864), 246. 20  “Our Address,” Illustrated London News, May 14, 1842, British Newspaper Archive. 21  Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 253. 22  Beegan, The Mass Image, 54.

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sketch the locality” but was rarely granted admittance to the event itself.23 To depict a royal fancy-dress ball for the opening issue, engraver John Gilbert had to base his designs on “scanty scraps of information” gleaned from other newspapers, so he pre-emptively depicted Prince Albert’s promised “coronal of pearls” as a necklace rather than the tiara it turned out to be.24 When an event was unexpected and catastrophic, such a fire in Hamburg that same week, the newspaper had to lean fully on pre-existing images: in this case they used a print of the city from the British Museum and simply added flames, smoke and crowds.25 As Jim Mussell puts it, ILN articles and their images were often “topical rather than news”.26 The ILN also shared panoramas’ attempt to offer both immersion and overview. The newspaper prided itself on showcasing immersive eyewitness sketches and later photographs, but also offered regular and celebrated pull-out panorama supplements. While Michel de Certeau differentiates two modes of perceiving the city—the elevated map-making perspective and the immersed pedestrian viewpoint—Anne Hultzsch suggests that the ILN combined and even “merge[d]” the two.27 As I have shown in Part I, moreover, this combination was already part of nineteenth-­ century culture before and beyond the ILN. Whenever the ILN depicts large crowds or landscapes, elevated perspectives predominate.28 Sometimes these are obvious (views from a hilltop or upstairs window) while at other times they are much more inconspicuous, with the artist’s eye surveying from just above the heads of the crowd. Andrea Korda argues that this elevated perspective absented the artist from the scene to adopt what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “the discourse of 23  Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 1:233. 24  Vizetelly, 1:232. 25  Vizetelly, 1:233–34. 26  James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 79. 27  Anne Hultzsch, “The Crowd and the Building: Flux in the Early Illustrated London News,” Architecture and Culture 6, no. 3 (September 2, 2018): 373; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 119. 28  Charlotte Boman shows that photographers similarly took landscape and townscape shots (1850s onward) from an elevated angle, which was further replicated when the photograph was engraved for publication in ILN. She suggests that the elevation was even enhanced during engraving, but this is not apparent to me. Charlotte Boman, “At Home in the Victorian City? Revisiting Thomas Annan and the Social Contexts of Early Urban Photography,” History of Photography 43, no. 1 (2019): 30.

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mechanical objectivity”.29 This perspective offered the delusive “view from nowhere” so critiqued by Thomas Nagel and Donna Haraway and concealed the mediation of the photographer, the draughtsman, and the engraver, in order to make the reader feel as if they were present.30 Her analysis ironically suggests that through keeping the viewer at an elevated distance, the ILN ultimately heightened the sense of presence that is integral to immersion. The ILN’s ability to generate immersion from elevated perspectives was tested, a decade into its publication, by the Crimean War. When this conflict broke out in 1853 on the fringes of Europe, it was the first non-­ colonial war involving British soldiers since 1815. Although it has since faded from western popular consciousness behind the First and Second World Wars, its break-up of the long-standing alliance between Russian and Austria was “a crucial watershed” in European geopolitics, encouraging Italian, German and Romanian nationalism and setting Russia against western Europe.31 The war was also reported in a radically new way, benefiting from speedy transmission of written sources via steam railways and ships, and through the very new technology of the telegraph. While the French newspaper coverage of the war was censored (as British coverage of later wars would be), the British newspapers were startlingly open about the commanders’ failings, even famously helping to topple the Aberdeen government in January 1855.32 There has rightly been substantial attention paid to The Times’s ground-breaking and celebrated special correspondent William Howard Russell.33 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, a penny newspaper catering for working-class readers, has recently also received productive attention for its adoption, re-publication and re-­ framing of French articles and images from L’Illustration.34 The ILN, however, gives us a specific opportunity to consider the way that

 Daston and Galison, Objectivity.  Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London, 36; Nagel, The View From Nowhere; Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 31  Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Penguin, 2011), xxi. 32  Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination, 18. 33  Catherine Waters, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886, Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 34  Thomas Smits, The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870 (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2020), Chapter 3. 29 30

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illustrations simultaneously drew on photographs and relied on panoramic models to represent the war. The Crimean War was rapidly remediated into both print and spectacle. Stefanie Markovits has emphasized the two-way dialogue between newspaper reporting of the war (especially by Russell) and soldiers’ and civilians’ letters, as farmers, travelers and more wrote in to The Times with suggestions for the soldiers on such issues as how to keep warm in the Crimean winter.35 Ulrich Keller has gone further in his assertions of reciprocity, arguing that Crimean battles were “conducted as spectacles to be seen from privileged viewpoints”.36 Here I explore how photographs and written accounts were remediated into news and panoramic paintings and the extent to which these were based on or generated overview. I compare the ILN’s visual and textual record of the Crimean War with those of Roger Fenton and Mary Seacole. Both Fenton and Seacole reflected on the challenges of gaining an overview on the war, while the ILN tried to offer overview, but sometimes skirted around the issue by drawing (as did Fenton) on extant artistic traditions. Fenton was an artist by training, who had taken up photography over the previous few years, and was sent on a photographic expedition to the Crimea (February to June 1855) commissioned by the Manchester publisher, print-seller and dealer Thomas Agnew & Sons. The photographs that Fenton took there were intended for newspaper publication, exhibition and sale, but they also had a further purpose, since Agnew simultaneously commissioned a history painting from Thomas Barker for which Fenton’s photographs would serve as preliminary material.37 We can gain insights into the relationship between the two by studying the photographs and painting, as well as the letters that Fenton sent home to William Agnew and to his wife Grace. The letters alternate between evoking a yearning to come home, accounts of champagne-fueled dinners and explanations of why his task was taking so long, but they also recurrently show concern about the best ways to gain a suitable and manageable perspective

35  Stefanie Markovits, “Rushing Into Print: ‘Participatory Journalism’ During the Crimean War,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 4 (2008): 559–86; Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination, Chapter 1. 36  Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle, 4. 37  Sophie Gordon, Shadows of War: Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), 39.

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on the “wide stretches” of inactivity in the Crimean War and its simultaneous “infinity of detail”.38 Seacole was a nurse and “doctress” by informal training from her mother, who set out from Britain with a determination to minister to the British troops, some of whom she knew from their previously being stationed in Jamaica.39 Turned down for nursing duties by Florence Nightingale’s hospital in Scutari near Constantinople, Seacole continued her travels across the Black Sea and set up a shop and inn near Balaklava, from which she also made journeys out to nurse wounded and ill soldiers. Bankrupt by the end of the war, she published her Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) partly to help recoup her reputation and finances. Growing attention has been paid to how she navigated her identity and reception as a biracial woman in Britain, as well as some to her maternal persona.40 Much less attention has gone to her record of the war itself, but her perspective and Fenton’s offer valuable counterpoints to each other. Both Fenton and Seacole emphasize the limited information available to those behind the front lines, drawing on the “eyewitness” mode but also subverting it. “Eyewitness accounts were not necessarily informed accounts”, as Clare Pettitt cogently puts it in her study of the 1848 revolutions.41 Seacole introduces a chapter on “those great events in the [battle]field of which I was a humble witness” with the comment: “if the reader should be surprised at my leaving any memorable action of the 38  Roger Fenton to William Agnew, 9 April 1855, in Joseph Fenton letter-book, Gernscheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin. Letter 8 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea,” accessed October 19, 2020, http://rogerfenton.dmu.ac.uk. 39  Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 12–14. 40   Evelyn J.  Hawthorne, “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole,” Biography 23, no. 2 (2000): 309–31; Nicole Fluhr, “‘Their Calling Me “Mother” Was Not, I Think, Altogether Unmeaning’: Mary Seacole’s Maternal Personae,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (2006): 95–113; Julia Lee, “Mary Seacole and the Virtual Nation,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 15, no. 1 (2019): 3; Aeron Hunt, “Ordinary Claims: War, Work, Service, and the Victorian Veteran,” Victorian Studies 61, no. 3 (2019): 395–418; Samantha Pinto, “‘The Right Woman in the Right Place’: Mary Seacole and Corrective Histories of Empire,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 50, no. 2 (2019): 1–31; Alisha R. Walters, “‘The Tears I Could Not Repress, Rolling down My Brown Cheeks’: Mary Seacole, Feeling, and the Imperial Body,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 16, no. 1 (2020). 41  Pettitt, Serial Revolutions, 54.

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army unnoticed, he may be sure that it is because I was mixing medicines or making good things in the kitchen of the British Hotel, and first heard the particulars of it, perhaps, from the newspapers which came from home”.42 This passage highlights how, as a working-class biracial woman, Seacole was too busy attending to her (professional) domestic duties to be a constant spectator. Although this is an apologetic admission of lowliness, it is also a retort, reminding the reader of the value and necessity of those tasks that take her away from a spectatorial role. Her account highlights that immersion by no means leads automatically to overview: if you are necessarily immersed with your head down and facing the other way, overview might not be forthcoming. While she situates her account in an “authentic” realist mode, it also blurs the boundary with Teukolsky’s other category of the “mundane, routine” working-class “everyday”.43 For Seacole, the two categories are inextricable. Fenton similarly struggled to gain certainty about the news on his arrival in the Crimea. When his ship arrived into Balaclava in March 1855, he observed: an officer has just passed us & given us the news (how true you will know better than I) that the Emperor of Russia is dead of an apoplectic fit the said news having come by electric telegraph from Vienna[.] There is a great speculation on board in consequence. Next we are told that there are 18 to 20,000 English troops effective instead of 10 as the Times said.44

It is not clear which source of information is likely to be most authoritative: those on board do not necessarily trust The Times over more direct local reports, but just as Seacole might receive details third-hand via the war correspondent via the printed newspapers, Fenton is not prepared to believe the news of the Tsar’s death without corroboration from home. Both relied on reports in British newspapers to understand what was going on around them. Although being behind the lines at a distance hampers understanding of front-line events, so does being too close. Seacole, who got a lot closer to the warfare itself than Fenton did, also articulates the challenge of comprehending the war from within. On returning home at night from the  Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, 128.  Teukolsky, Picture World, 85. 44  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 8 March 1855. Letter 3  in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 42 43

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assault on the “Great Redan” (a Russian fortification outside Sebastopol), she recalls: “I heard all about the events of the luckless day from those who had seen them from posts of safety, while I, who had been in the midst of it all day, knew so little”.45 This is the perspective of the immersed veteran, similar to that evoked in Stendhal’s La Charteuse de Parme (1839), though unlike Stendhal’s protagonist, Seacole knows the day’s significance, just not which details will be judged most strategically significant. Elsewhere, she even draws a comparison between the skills of The Times correspondent Russell and the elevation of panoramic perspective: Just as a spectator seeing one of the battles from a hill, as I did the Tchernaya, knows more about it than the combatant in the valley below, who only thinks of the enemy whom it is his immediate duty to repel; so you, through the valuable aid of the cleverest man in the whole camp [William Russell], read in the Times’ columns the details of that great campaign, while we, the actors in it, had enough to do to discharge our own duties well, and rarely concerned ourselves in what seemed of such importance to you.46

This complex passage suggests that elevation, just as much as journalistic expertise, is the route to full understanding, though it also provocatively hints that the immersed perspective may have value too. On the one hand, the passage suggests that overview is achieved by a significant individual who then disseminates it to mass recipients: individuals hold elevated viewpoints (“the cleverest man”, or “a spectator”, who on another occasion could be Seacole herself), while those immersed (“the combatant”, “the enemy”, “the actors”, on this occasion including Seacole among their number) are multiple and entangled. On the other hand, Seacole emphasizes her routine lack of elevation to prove her veteran status and emphasize the value of her war work both on and off the battlefield.47 She brings together here her two points discussed above, suggesting that elevated (panoramic) distance enables overview, whereas a literally lowly immersed position, whether on the battlefield or behind the lines, prevents that overview but enables a different set of insights. Seacole thus foregrounds the struggle to find aesthetic forms that could represent both  Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, 137.  Seacole, 128–29. 47  Aeron Hunt convincingly argues that Seacole “adopts the role of veteran” to argue for her actions as service and sacrifice rather than simply commercial work. Hunt, “Ordinary Claims,” 397. 45 46

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the micro and macro experiences of war. This struggle is normally associated with World War I, but it is already visible here in Seacole’s 1850s account.48 Fenton had a much more protected sojourn in the Crimea (though he also grew frustrated at the living conditions), but expresses even greater skepticism about the possibility of gaining and representing an overview on the conflict. In his opinion, neither panoramic nor picturesque perspectives could fully capture Crimea. He expresses frustration with the way that newspaper illustrations in Britain were representing the war. In a letter to his employer, he explains that “the scenes we have here are not bits of Artistic effort which can be effectually rendered by a rough sketch but wide stretches of open country covered with an infinity of detail”.49 Such a landscape defies picturesque representation, since its scale is panoramic but the detail is irreducible to any eye-catching representative example. Fenton expands on this point to Grace a few weeks later, commenting that his landscape photographs lack “foregrounds”, whereas “[a]ll the sketches seen at home err in making [the town] seem too near & in making the details too large in order to obtain distinctness”.50 Fenton dismisses these as inauthentic and insists that his relative lack of control over particularly his landscape photographs make them unavoidably authentic. He worries, however, that because they fail to live up to what Teukolsky describes as aesthetic “realist codes”, they will be perceived as less authentic than sketches that do.51 Such sketches artificially enlarge landmarks and compress the distances between them in order to be readable on the newspaper page, and where relevant to deliver a clear propagandist message. Far from gaining epistemological and emotional proximity to the scene of warfare, Fenton was conscious of his distance and frustrated that illustrators used the artistic license he lacked (long

48  Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2013), 10; Trudi Tate, “Sebastopol: On the Fall of a City,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2015, no. 20 (May 13, 2015): 14, https://doi.org/10.16995/ ntn.720. 49  Roger Fenton to William Agnew, 9 April 1855. Letter 8  in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 50  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 29 April 1855, in Annie Grace Fenton letter-book, Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford. Letter 11 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 51  Teukolsky, Picture World, 86.

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before the foreshortening abilities of zoom or telephoto lenses) to deny this distance. The ILN was perfectly happy to distort perspective or distance in order to give its readers panoramic or picturesque views of the Crimea. The newspaper was popular among some soldiers, and Fenton tells of one who had papered his hut with prints cut from its pages.52 However, the newspaper held back until just before Aberdeen’s government fell (January 1855) from illustrating the disease and supply shortages that were killing thousands of Allied soldiers, though it did then depict the harsh conditions of trench warfare.53 Most of the half-page and larger illustrations of the war that the ILN featured over its three-year span were elevated and/ or picturesque. Even after they had begun to criticize the government’s handling of casualties, February 1855 featured an article entitled “Sketches in the Crimea”, based on those by Laurence Oliphant (a travel-writer and diplomat—later Christian mystic—then employed by the War Secretary). The top half of the page (see Fig. 5.1) shows “Simpheropol, from an original sketch”, and so draws, like Fenton’s photographs and the panoramic painting compiled from them, on an epistemology of authenticity grounded in eyewitness experience. All eyewitness experiences, however, are couched within aesthetic modes of representation, and Oliphant’s sketches draw on various picturesque conventions. The sketch “is taken from a rising ground to the east of the town” and thus is able to feature eye-catching, picturesque local figures in the foreground (including two camels) as well as the town, with its eye-catching domes and spire, and a mountain ridge behind. The picturesque category, Ann Bermingham and Cynthia Wall both agree, had by the nineteenth century “become so overused that it had become virtually meaningless”, but we can still refer to William Gilpin’s 1791–92 characterization of this aesthetic as suggestive detail and texture rather than the smooth surfaces

52  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 28 March 1855. Letter 6 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” Helen Groth interprets this as a means for the soldier to gain some perspective on the war he is living through, but the prints were probably a combination of Crimean and domestic scenes, as depicted in John Dalbiac Luard’s painting A Welcome Arrival (1857). See Helen Groth, “Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere: Roger Fenton’s Crimea Exhibition and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (September 2002): 565. 53  On ILN’s belated criticism, see Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle, 98. On its depictions of trench warfare in winter 1855, see Teukolsky, Picture World, 103–6.

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Fig. 5.1  ‘Views in the Crimea’, Illustrated London News, 10 February 1855, 129, from British Newspaper Archive. Permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library

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Fig. 5.2  Roger Fenton, “Sevastopol from the Mortar Battery” (April 1855), Royal Collection Trust RCIN 2500512. Permission granted courtesy of Royal Collection Trust

of classical beauty.54 Fenton made the most of opportunities for picturesque composition—his carefully posed group portraits delight in  local dress and staged interaction—but the image on the bottom half of the page is probably the type that made Fenton frustrated (see Fig. 5.1). This illustration represents “the town of Bagtcheserai […] about three miles off”, but it makes individual buildings as distinguishable as if it were much closer.55 Such maneuvers put Fenton’s photography at a disadvantage in seeking to capture the vast, sparse landscape. The panoramic photographs that he took in the Crimea, as he predicted, were bleak and hazy and would have felt disconcertingly empty for viewers accustomed to bustling, well-populated panorama paintings (see Fig. 5.2).

54  Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 84; Cynthia Wall, Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 21–23. Jennifer Green-Lewis uses Gilpin’s definition: see Jennifer Green-Lewis, Victorian Photography, Literature and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 69. 55  “Views in the Crimea,” Illustrated London News, February 10, 1855, 129, British Newspaper Archive.

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At least four 360° panoramas were produced of the Crimean War (along with various smaller scale moving panoramas), three of which were displayed at Leicester Square. Robert Burford and Henry Selous presented a view of the Battle of the Alma from December 1854, then replaced it six months later with a “View of the city of Sebastopol, and the surrounding fortifications: the attack of the allied armies; the British & French camps, &c”, before finally one of the Fall of Sebastopol. Laurie Garrison highlights the spectacular success of the “City of Sebastopol” and describes Burford as using his “standard approach of uncompromised support for the military”, in which he “refrain[ed] from taking any radical positions that might alienate his audience”.56 The surviving program features details that are implied to come from eyewitnesses (a description of the British camp’s tents “of which there are now a considerable number, being pitched in line, about 8 yards asunder”; an anecdote about Fort Constantine being so strong that a ship “is said to have fired from one broadside 2700 shots and shells against it without producing any visible result”) but never suggests that any part of it is based on photographic source material.57 This is unsurprising since it went on display before Fenton even arrived home from his Crimean trip. In the panorama revival of the 1870s and 1880s that took place in the United States and Continental Europe, photography would serve as a handmaiden to painting, in a production process that Oliver Grau describes as a sequence running “photography— drawing—photography—projection—drawing—painting”.58 However, its absence from these wartime Crimean panoramas shows that even photography’s integration into these processes, let alone its “second birth” as an autonomous medium, was a while in coming. By contrast, the other 360° panorama that we know of, by Jean-Charles Langlois, did use photography. Having previously painted panoramas of Napoleonic battles, after the Crimean War he produced a Panorama de la prise de Sébastopol, financed by Napoleon III and displayed from 1860 to 1864 at the Champs-Elysées in Paris.59 The Panorama was based on 56  Laurie Garrison, ‘Introduction to Description of a View of the City of Sebastopol, and the surrounding fortifications’, 59–61, in Erle et al., Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts. Volume 3: Stable Panoramas in Britain, Part 3, 3:59, 61. The British Library holds a copy of this panorama program, at shelf-mark 10349.t.15.(62.). 57  “Description of a View of the City of Sebastopol, and the surrounding fortifications,” in Erle et al., Panoramas, 1787–1900: Texts and Contexts. Volume 3: Stable Panoramas in Britain, Part 3: 63–81, 79, 72. 58  Grau, Virtual Art, 121. 59  On Langlois’ panorama, see Maurice Samuels, “Regarding the Crimean War: History, Spectacle, Modernity,” Dix-Neuf 6, no. 1 (2006): 26–41.

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Langlois’ own trip with Léon-Eugène Méhédin to Sebastopol soon after the city’s fall, during which Langlois took sketches and Méhédin took photographs, including sixteen contiguous panoramic views to produce a 360° perspective from the elevation of a strategically central tower. As Maurice Samuels details, Langlois specifically chose to represent the moment he argued was “the war’s climax”, in the early afternoon of 8 September 1855, “when the allies launched their assault against the Malakoff Tower”. He also, however, strategically incorporated into the painting the French military commander Marshall Pelissier, who was not on the scene but whom visitors (and the government) would have expected to see celebrated. In this case, therefore, Langlois both drew on the precision-­recording of photography and capitalized on the panorama’s capacity for artistic license. He turned panoramas’ inability to show change over time into a selling-point as he offered “the sensation of witnessing history in the making”.60 Whereas these panorama painters chose to represent “pregnant moments” leading to action, Fenton’s photographs (like Langlois’ and Méhédin’s) are mostly devoid of action, predominantly serving as illustrative portraits of officers, soldiers and camp life. Scholars diverge on whether he could have done otherwise. By the time Fenton got to Crimea, the war had become one of attrition rather than drama; his unwieldy equipment and long exposure times also combined to prevent him from capturing images of any military encounters as they took place. Some have also argued that Fenton was commissioned by the War Office to balance out Russell’s critical reports with more upbeat images, though the timings of this claim are not fully convincing.61 He drew public attention to the horrors of war, but instead of showing violence firsthand, Fenton’s  Samuels, 33.  Natalie M. Houston, “Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (October 1, 2001): 364, https://doi. org/10.1353/yale.2001.0025. See also Matthew Paul Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 117–21; John Hannavy, The Camera Goes to War: Photographs from the Crimean War, 1854–56 (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1974), 11; Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 99–101. Sarah Greenough points out that while the criticism of Aberdeen’s government began in earnest over the winter, Fenton was already making preparations for the trip during the autumn. Sarah Greenough, “‘A New Starting Point’: Roger Fenton’s Life,” in All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860, ed. Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm R. Daniel, and Sarah Greenough (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 20. 60 61

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photographs draw on suggestive metonyms of it, such as the iconic and contentious cannonballs in his most famous Crimean image, the “Valley of the Shadow of Death”.62 Fenton himself was repeatedly nearly shot on his excursion into the valley and responded with frustration to his employer Agnew’s request for “a view of a Russian sortie”: as he put it in a letter home, “my van, apparatus and myself would all be knocked into everlasting smash if seen within half a mile of the advanced trenches; It is amusing to see how little idea people have of what is possible in this world”.63 The ILN, by contrast, did endeavor to represent the war’s key battles, but did so from a very long way away. This choice was partly a question of scale (how else to show the whole battlefield at once?) but also one of temperament, as the ILN sought to avoid offence and any potential charges of voyeurism.64 September 1855, for example, offers a half-page illustration of “the Battle of the Tchernaya, or Traktir-Bridge”, in which, apart from the occasional delineated horse, the engraving turns the armies into no more than repeated circles with bayonets sticking out of their tops (see Fig. 5.3). The text insists: “It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the importance of the defeat sustained by the Russians at the battle of Traktir-­ Bridge”, and in line with this, readers might have dwelt longer upon the contrasting image that fills the bottom half of the page: the “Croats’ camp at Balaclava”, which lets readers gaze instead upon picturesque turbans, tents and hookahs.65 After the Battle of Balaklava the previous year, the ILN included a half-page illustration of “the light cavalry charge” (the one shortly afterward immortalized by Alfred Tennyson as the “Charge of the Light Brigade”) and a full page of the “heavy cavalry”. These illustrations do include some horsemen and even fallen bodies in the foreground, but even those figures quickly recede into waves of circles and lines. In

62  Groth notes that this was not the site of the Charge of the Light Brigade (as its name’s echo of Tennyson’s poem suggests), but Fenton never suggests it was. The valley’s name came instead from being a prime target of the Russian artillery, hence the many cannonballs. Fenton probably repositioned the cannonballs into the center of the path for maximum visual effect. 63  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 13 May 1855. Letter 13 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 64  On the risks of voyeurism in panorama representations of another 1850s conflict, see Kingstone, “Panoramas, Patriotic Voyeurism, and the ‘Indian Mutiny.’” 65   [Edward Angelo Goodall], “The War in the Crimea,” Illustrated London News, September 8, 1855, 293, British Newspaper Archive.

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Fig. 5.3  [Edward Angelo Goodall], “The War in the Crimea”, Illustrated London News, 8 September 1855, 293, British Newspaper Archive; permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library

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Teukolsky’s vocabulary, these illustrations function “under realist codes” that represent violent warfare via distancing conventions.66 The struggle to know how best to represent violence might explain the ILN’s occasional departures from realist representation. Celebrating the Allies’ eventual success in besieging Sebastopol, the ILN represents the city’s docks on fire, but overlays this at the front of the image with iconographic elements—the Russian double-headed eagle and other accoutrements of war (flags, cannon, a cluster of cannonballs)—adding an allegorical layer (see Fig. 5.4).67 The iconography reduces our emotional proximity to the victims of warfare and instead encourages jingoistic celebratory emotions against an obvious national enemy. Using a very different technique, ILN also used Fenton’s photography to bolster its pro-war message. An October 1855 front page soon after Fenton had returned shows “General Simpson, Commander of Her Majesty’s Forces in the Crimea. From a photograph by Fenton”.68 The attendant article chastises a group of politicians (Richard Cobden, John Bright, William Gladstone and Lord John Russell among them) who were calling for an end to the war, so the stalwart image of the army general, hand on hip as he gazed out past the edges of the photographic vignette, is remediated to reinforce ILN’s support for continuation of the war. Most of Fenton’s Crimea photographs were portraits, and his letters to his wife describe how different social classes among the British army had divergent reactions to the chance of having their portrait taken. Initially, hoping to minimize curious enquiries, he had “photographic van” written on the side of the vehicle that contained his dark-room, but this turned out to exacerbate the problem. He evokes in comic style for his wife the miscommunications with passersby: The door being locked there was another knock & another speech “Here you fellow open the door & take my picture” The door was opened & he 66  [wood-engraving after Constantin Guys], “The Battle of Balaclava,” Illustrated London News, November 18, 1854, 501, 517, British Newspaper Archive; Teukolsky, Picture World, 86. 67  “Sebastopol after the Siege,” Illustrated London News, November 3, 1855, British Newspaper Archive. 68  “The Peace Coalition,” Illustrated London News, October 13, 1855, 424, British Newspaper Archive. For another portrait from a photograph (by Carol Szathmari) see “Prince Gortschakoff,” Illustrated London News, November 3, 1855, British Newspaper Archive.

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Fig. 5.4  Illustration from “Sebastopol after the Siege”, Illustrated London News, 3 November 1855, 1. Newspaper Archive; permission granted courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library was told that we were not taking portraits “What did you come for if you’re not going to take pictures, I’ll have mine done cost what it may what’s to pay?”69

Later, he again describes being “sadly bothered with applications to take portraits” from those in the lower military ranks. He complains: “If I refuse to take them, I can get no facilities for conveying my van from one locality to another. [By contrast,] If I take only those that the public care about, I generally find that they have no time or I [sic] like humbug or want their horses taken & not themselves”.70 He had to ingratiate himself with the rank and file in order to access transport and gain his photographic overviews, but it seems that the generals and officers he had been commissioned to photograph—who were most likely to have been photographed before—were notably less excited than the regular soldiers at the prospect of photographic immortality. Keller anachronistically criticizes Fenton for his less-than-radical choices of subject-matter and composition, and his use of “a fixed camera set-up on a prearranged stage”, as if in

69  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 15 March 1855. Letter 5 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 70  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 29 April 1855. Letter 11 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.”

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a photographic studio, but fails to place sufficient weight on a crucial fact about Fenton’s portraits that we will turn to now.71 What might surprise us today is that Fenton’s photographs of the Crimea were not taken primarily to be standalone photographic prints, but as source material for a panoramic history painting. That painting, by war- and portrait painter Thomas Jones Barker (1813–82, no relation of panoramist Robert Barker), who regularly worked for Agnew and Sons, was entitled The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol (1856). Agnew specifically commissioned Fenton’s trip with the intended painting in mind, so even though Fenton’s photographs are now more iconic and celebrated than the painting, the two need to be understood together. Barker drew upon and remediated Fenton’s photographs, embedding miniature portraits of over fifty individuals in a scene that Sophie Gordon reminds us “is entirely imaginary as it would have been impossible for all the individuals depicted to have gathered together at the same time”.72 The painting itself is full of hustle and bustle, with multiple clusters of figures in the foreground representing different facets of the army, and a distant high horizon before which the distant city of Sebastopol can be glimpsed (see Fig. 5.5). It is more dynamic than Fenton’s photographs, but also more hierarchical, leaning heavily on pre-existing painterly codes. Photography reveals officers and their subordinates to be the same size, whereas Barker was able to paint the generals front and center on glowing white steeds, while lower ranking men feature more in the background and around the edges. The only women in the painting are an unconvincing likeness of Florence Nightingale in the background (she more closely resembles an army officer’s wife photographed by Fenton) and a “vivandière” at the bottom right of the painting, in a tableau transposed— though in mirror image—from one of Fenton’s photographs. His description of that photoshoot gives us another perspective on the tableau. He relates how one afternoon a female canteen worker “was brought up[.] I made first a picture of her by herself & then a group in which she is giving assistance to a wounded soldier. It was great fun the soldiers enjoyed it so

71  Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle, 144. On the lack of suffering on display in Fenton’s photographs, see also Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 99–101. 72  Gordon, Shadows of War, 40.

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Fig. 5.5  Charles George Lewis’s engraving of Thomas J. Barker’s painting The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol (1856). Permission granted courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust

much & entered so completely in to the spirit of the thing”.73 Barker turns her photographed amused expression into a saintly one and positions her as an exotically picturesque complement to the centrally positioned cavalry officers. Fenton’s account, however, reminds us that the photographic compositions were not only posed but also performative.74 When Fenton’s photographs and engravings of T. J. Barker’s painting were marketed to consumers, both were mediated to the viewer through explanatory printed keys. The key to Barker’s painting identified each of the miniature portraits by name, and specified that the painting was done “from Photographs and Sketches taken in the Crimea expressly for this

73  Roger Fenton to Grace Fenton, 6 May 1855. Letter 12 in “Roger Fenton’s Letters from the Crimea.” 74  For the photograph itself, see www.rct.uk/collection/2500401/wounded-zouave-and-­ a-vivandiegravere. The canteen worker’s individual portrait can be found at www.rct.uk/ collection/2500338/vivandiegravere.

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picture by Roger Fenton Esq.” (see Fig. 5.6),75 making clear the symbiotic relationship between the media of photography, panoramic history painting and finally engraving, from which most of Agnew and Sons’ £10,000+ income from the project was generated.76 Fenton’s “Photographic Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol” was published with a printed “Key Plate” with labels to help the viewer make sense of its tiny distant landmarks (see Fig. 5.7). In their use of explanatory keys, both formats follow in a tradition that was central to panoramas, as well as more broadly to large-scale highly populated history paintings, such as those of coronations.77 These keys also, however, treated their subjects as compilations that could be mined for information.

Compilations of Photography The latter part of the chapter turns to examine photography in compilations. First I consider the continuation and evolution of Barker’s types of techniques in paintings and photo-montages, and then I turn to photographic collections, both those of Fenton’s own images and then other ambitious attempts (particularly the utopian visions of Oliver Wendell Holmes) to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the world in photographic form. Compiling a singular whole from several photographs, as Barker did in his painting, was one way to prioritize overview. Photography risked a new 75  Gordon, Shadows of War, 39. See also Richard L. Stein, “Roger Fenton’s Killing Fields,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 42, no. 2 (March 14, 2020): 192–95. 76  The details of the income come from Roger T.  Stearn, “Barker, Thomas Jones (1813–1882), War and Portrait Painter,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1416. The painting itself is now in the private collection of Irina Tsirulnikova; the Royal Collection Trust holds a copy of Charles George Lewis’s engraving. 77  “Panorama of the Coronation of George IV, 19th July 1821” (W. Samuels, 1822), State Library of South Australia, https://digital.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/nodes/view/2181; “Soffe’s Panoramic Representation of the Grand Procession on the Day of the Queen’s Coronation” (W.  Soffe, 1838), Yale Center for British Art, https://collections.britishart. yale.edu/catalog/orbis:3471917; “Spooner’s Panoramic View of the Queen’s Marriage Procession” (William Spooner, 1840), https://www.rct.uk/collection/813076/spooners-­ panoramic-­view-of-the-queens-marriage-procession; Charles Robert Leslie, Queen Victoria Receiving the Sacrament at Her Coronation, 28 June 1838, September 1838, oil on canvas, 97.0 x 187.6 cm, September 1838, Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/406993/queen-victoria-receiving-the-sacrament-at-her-coronation-28-june-1838.

Fig. 5.6  Key plate to Thomas J. Barker’s painting The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs before Sebastopol. Permission granted courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust

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Fig. 5.7  Day & Son (I, active 1850s–1880s), Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol., 1856, Lithograph. 41.6 × 116.2 cm (16 3/8 × 45 ¾ in.), 84.XM.1028.80. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

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relationship between general and particular and thus also between overview and immersion. Von Brevern argues that painted art “sacrificed detail to the whole”, whereas with the camera “a whole new class of details came into the world […] the represented, yet unintentional detail” and disturbed “the hierarchy of centre and margin”.78 Although painted panoramas had disrupted that “hierarchy of centre and margin” by removing any singular central focal point (see Chap. 2), their painted format did not contain details that were “represented, yet unintentional”. Remediating photographs into compiled paintings enabled artists to continue being intentional in the details they chose to represent, a practice that continued right through the century.79 The 1880s saw a fashion for composite group portraits (a kind of photo-­montage rendered in paint), and Lowes Cato Dickinson was commissioned to produce several of these, all marking notable sporting events. Attendees who subscribed to buy one of the lithographic prints were ­photographed in a studio, guaranteed representation in the resultant painted crowd scene and listed in the attendant key. Throughout this period, photography continued to be seen as a supplement to other practices. The 1851 Great Exhibition’s committee scattered photography among artistic techniques and scientific instruments, and even ten years later, the 1862 International Exhibition’s commissioners proposed to situate photography with the cameras rather than with the fine art, before a compromise that pleased nobody as they squeezed the medium into an uncomfortable marginal space known in frustration as the

78  Von Brevern, “Two or Three Things Photography Did to Painting,” 111–13. Daniel Novak has also traced how debates about the value of photography reflected literary anxiety about realism, since both were seen as a “preponderance of details without a governing structure”. Daniel A. Novak, “Photographic Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Photography and the Novel Form,” Novel 43, no. 1 (May 1, 2010): 23, https://doi. org/10.1215/00295132-2009-058. See also Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8. 79  In the 1850s and 60s the medium of wood-engraving faced a struggle between an equivalent two approaches: the interpretative approach (where the practitioner used their training and skill to generate “truth to nature”) and the facsimile approach (which relied on “mechanical objectivity,” could be combined from sub-sections and did not require such skilled engravers, making it less well-paid and eroding the sector’s status). On this, see Beegan, The Mass Image, 56–57. On truth to nature, mechanical objectivity and trained judgment, see Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 18.

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“photographic garret”.80 One 1856 photograph by Oscar Gustave Rejlander was entitled “Infant photography giving the painter an additional brush”.81 Rejlander (who later became photographer for Darwin’s 1872 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) described how he was first inspired to take up the practice by seeing a photograph where “the fold in his coat sleeve was just the very thing I required for a portrait I was then painting at home” and concluded that it was easier to paint classical drapery via photographs.82 Here photography becomes the intermediate form between two (other) art forms, sculpture and painting; it had clearly not yet achieved its “second birth”. In this framework, photography also serves as a storage medium: Rejlander was transporting home the fold of a draped sleeve in greater specificity than he could secure via a sketch or simply his mind’s eye, as Fenton transported back to Britain a compressed overview of the Crimean War. As photography’s status rose, however, some practitioners stopped feeling obliged to remediate it into painted form, and photo-montage itself emerged as a format. Practitioners of so-called composition photography (including Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson) sought to hide the joins between components and create consistent unified images out of their montages. Some scholars have argued that montage gradually shifted in the twentieth century from a “naturalist” bent (designed to conceal human intervention) to a “formalist” approach foregrounding collage, but as Jordan Bear has shown, French photographers were producing visibly collaged montages as early as 1872.83 Eugène Appert’s efforts were so detachably modular that he even produced different iterations as the new 80  Roger Taylor, Photographs Exhibited in Britain, 1839–1865: A Compendium of Photographers and Their Works (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2002). Introduction accessed via Roger Taylor, “Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839–1865,” 10, accessed November 5, 2020, http://peib.dmu.ac.uk/about/context.php. 81  This photograph is reproduced in Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 (Cambridge: University Press, 2011), x. 82   Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “An Apology for Art-Photography,” British Journal of Photography, February 16, 1863, 76–77. On this see also Colin Harding, https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/oscar-gustav-rejlander-pioneered-combination-printing. 83  Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976); Robert A. Sobieszek, “Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage, Part I: The Naturalist Strain,” Artforum 17, no. 1 (September 1978): 58–65; Robert A. Sobieszek, “Composite Imagery and the Origins of Photomontage, Part II: The Formalist Strain,” Artforum 17, no. 2 (October 1978): 40–45; Jordan Bear, “Pieces of the Past: Early Photomontage and the Voice of History,” History of Photography 41, no. 2 (2017): 26–140.

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Third Republic underwent upheaval and President Adolphe Thiers replaced members of his cabinet. All these compilation montages came with keys listing the people whose photographs they featured. As Bear puts it, this “attests to the insufficient legibility of the photographs alone”.84 These montages were therefore both visibly compiled and emerged from the conventions of panorama culture. Through analyzing the medium of photography, we can see how the two approaches of overview—the panorama and the compilation—shared common ground and leant on each other for support. Photographic compilations can offer a different type of overview when they remain as multiple separate images. As Sontag puts it, photography creates an “anthology of images” that makes us feel “we can hold the whole world in our hands”.85 It does so through compilation. To acquire an overview through photographs through any method other than montage, we need to mentally compile, collage and flick between them. Bleichmar and Schwartz argue that “images often travel in packs, as assemblages in which they echo and augment one another to produce coherent though nonlinear or non-narrative stories”.86 Compilation arguably contributed to photography’s “second birth”: Mary Warner Marien suggests that presenting photographs in series “expanded the notion of photography from that of an image-making practice to something akin to writing” and enabled the medium to be taken more seriously.87 Panoramas could, through the aid of their paratexts, conflate the idea of a single moment with the more narratively complex duration of the pregnant pause. Similarly, multiple linked photographs could be interpreted as having a greater narrative meaning than any single one. Photography collections can take several forms depending on how and when compilation takes place. They might be a set of photographs taken together (and potentially then scattered) or an assortment that were taken separately and gathered later. Those that Roger Fenton took in the Crimean War are an example of the first type. They were not necessarily destined to stay together, except in remediated form in Barker’s painting: just like those later taken of the American Civil War by Alexander Gardner,  Bear, “Pieces of the Past: Early Photomontage and the Voice of History,” 133.  Susan Sontag, On Photography [1977], Penguin Modern Classics (London: Penguin, 2008), 3. 86  Bleichmar and Schwartz, “Visual History,” 10. 87  Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 3rd edition (London: Lawrence King, 2010), 49. 84 85

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or by Felice Beato of the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Uprising, they were quickly made available for individual as well as portfolio purchase. Shortly after Fenton returned from the Crimea, the photographs he had taken there went on tour. His employers Agnew & Sons organized two parallel exhibitions in London and Manchester in autumn 1855, followed by others touring around England. The surviving pamphlet for the exhibition of Fenton’s photographs is proud and upbeat, quoting its high prices confidently (six guineas for “The Panorama of the Plateau before Sebastopol, in Eleven Views, delivered in a Portfolio”), and warning customers to get their orders in quickly: “As a very limited number of impressions can be printed, it is respectfully requested that those wishing to secure them will make early application to the Publishers”.88 The exhibitions were well reviewed and popular (one report suggests by end of March 1856, a total of 2 million visitors had attended, at a shilling each),89 but unfortunately for Agnew & Sons, this was not matched by purchases of the prints. As Roger Taylor describes, few families could afford the portfolios’ high prices, and after the eventual fall of Sebastopol in September 1855 and a peace treaty in March 1856, war weariness quickly overtook any residual enthusiasm.90 Far from wanting to commemorate its events through memorabilia, this increasingly unpopular war—with its long siege of attrition and high death rates from waterborne diseases—became something many people would rather forget. While (as I have discussed in Chap. 2) a certain time lag was expected and built into eyewitness media and their eventual arrival on exhibition tours around the country, a change in circumstances could easily turn a conventional and acceptable time lag into a sense of outmodedness. The Crimean War was no longer news, or even topical, and not everyone was yet interested in contemplating it as history. Two approaches to the war run side by side in responses to Fenton’s Crimean photographs. Orlando Figes argues that the war ushered in a revised attitude to military heroism, turning attention away from the dashing bravery of individual commanders or officers and instead toward the 88  “Pamphlet from an Exhibition of Roger Fenton’s Crimean Photographs, 1855,” Royal Collection, 16, 15, accessed November 5, 2020, https://www.rct.uk/ collection/2947508. 89  Gordon, Shadows of War, 73. 90  Taylor, Photographs Exhibited in Britain, 1839–1865, Photographies Exposées En Grand-­ Bretagne de 1839 à 1865. Introduction accessed via Taylor, “Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839–1865,” 10.

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stalwart, self-sacrificial bravery of the private soldiers.91 Seacole exemplified this in her account of friendships with soldiers, and she also attempted to capitalize on—and expand—it to claim her own veteran status. However, Fenton took his photographs for a very different tradition, that of eminence and official status. Queen Victoria, following that approach, had “Fenton’s portraits—and only the portraits—assembled in an album” in an emphatically hierarchical order.92 This became the first of a whole series devoted to honoring the principal officers of Britain’s military campaigns during the latter part of the nineteenth century.93 The Royal Family bought a total of 428 photographs from Fenton’s trip, mostly for the Prince of Wales (then aged fourteen), and these are still part of the Royal Collection Trust.94 These photographs were therefore not primarily intended as a collection, but became one after they were exhibited and marketed as one. Rather differently, organizations also began to actively collect photographs that had been taken separately. These quickly became tools of British imperialism, reminding us that even supposedly “non-narrative stories” of photographic compilations (see Bleichmar and Schwartz) can still have an ideological thrust. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) began collecting photographs from the 1860s and later requested its Fellows—primarily army and naval officers—to donate and send them in. They gathered an archive, catalogued by region, that as James Ryan put it “attempted to capture the world in photographs”.95 These were of course not necessarily taken with the compilation in mind, making them intrinsically diverse and less than coherent. You would not know that, however, from how John Thomson, the RGS’s Official Instructor in Photography, talked about them. In an 1891 BAAS lecture on photography and exploration, he mused: “What would one not give to have photographs of the Pharaohs or the Caesars, of the travellers, and their observations, who supplied Ptolemy with his early record of the world, of Marco Polo, and the places and people he visited on his arduous journey?” He immediately  Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade, 468–71.  Keller, The Ultimate Spectacle, 124, 194–98. 93  Keller, 124. 94  “Fenton’s Photographs in the Royal Collection,” accessed November 5, 2020, https:// www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/roger-fentons-photographs-of-the-crimea/ the-queens-gallery-palace-of/fentons-photographs-in-the-royal-collection. 88 of the 428 are duplicates. 95  Ryan, Picturing Empire, 23. 91 92

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followed that wistful thought, however, with a declaration: “We are now making history and the sun picture supplies the means of passing down a record of what we are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of our progress”.96 That final clause situates photography squarely in a framework of Christian mission, dating progress from Christ’s birth and seeing history as a progressive compilation of achievements. It sees the photographic collection as a transparent “record” of that historical progress. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, many more intentional photographic compilations were conceived, such as those to record built cultural heritage. The first of these was established in France in 1851, and such surveys proliferated across cities in Britain through the 1860s to 1880s.97 The amateur photographic survey movement—studied by Elizabeth Edwards in The Camera as Historian (2012)—took the notion of the series to extraordinary lengths. She compares the movement with national photography collections, and with Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946); his story “The Library of Babel” (1941), which focuses on an infinite archive is just as apposite. The survey movement focused more on recording surviving relics from the past than on capturing contemporary events as they happened, but it nonetheless projected forward to a time when the contemporary era would be historical. Edwards describes how photography promised “to grasp time and rematerialize it. Photographs extended the reach of the temporal beyond relations between the present and the past to the future as well, creating an archival grid through which the past might be accessible in an imaged future”.98 For her, the photographic survey movement “externalized collective memory” in a way that (contrary to Pierre Nora’s theories) did not destroy an organic emotional connection by depositing memory in the archive, but instead was emotionally invested in the archive.99 96  John Thomson, “Photography and Exploration,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society n.s. XIII (1891): 673. 97  These included Thomas Annan in 1860s Glasgow, Robert White Thrupp and Burgoyne in 1870s Birmingham, and in the 1870s and 1880s, the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London. 98  Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7. 99  Edwards, 14, 17. For Nora’s lamentative theories about externalized memory, see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

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The most ambitious mid-nineteenth-century vision of what a compilation of photographs could do was expressed by the American doctor and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes. His visions of the power of photographic—specifically stereoscopic—technology went beyond even the most zealous proponents of twenty-first-century virtual reality. He envisaged a utopian combination of the two types of photographic compilation just outlined: coherent sets of photographs, combined into a coherent overall set, enabling a complete overview. He was not entirely alone in this: as Marien relates, Ernest Lacan suggested something similar in his Photographic Sketches (1856), A. A. E. Disdéri’s L’Art de la Photographique (1862) imagined an enormous photographic encyclopedia of art, and in 1889 the British Journal of Photography hypothesized a similarly complete photographic archive.100 But the imagery that Holmes drew upon to conjure this utopian vision was the most disturbing and compelling. Between 1859 and 1863, Holmes wrote a series of articles for The Atlantic about photography. In the closing paragraphs of the first of these, he poses a set of predictions about the future of photography—and specifically the 3D illusion of stereoscopic photography—that are simultaneously tongue-in-cheek in their boldness and disconcerting in how they have since come to pass. His starting point is the indisputable statement that “[m]atter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable”. From this statement he draws a radical conclusion: through photographs, he writes, “we have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth”.101 Holmes’s writing was often whimsical and even tongue-in-cheek: in an article a few decades later, he described the electric tram as an upside-down witch holding a broomstick brush against the electric cables, so we need not read his article as a proposal to be implemented.102 Nonetheless, his vision of

100  Marien, Photography and Its Critics, 128. See British Journal of Photography, vol. 36 (London: Henry Greenwood & co., 1889), 688. 101  Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic, June 1, 1859, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereo graph/303361/. 102  “The Electric Witch. A Quaint Fancy. By Oliver Wendell Holmes,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 8 (August 1890): 154.

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stereoscopic photography provocatively envisages it superseding their three-dimensional subjects, which in turn become inconsequential. Holmes’s vision turns the “fruit of creation” into one enormous archive or compilation: The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library.

His radicalism lies partly in the slippage between the wish to “see any object” and the notion that seeing a photograph of it will serve the purpose. The other part is his belief that the archive collection will reach plenitude and supersede objects themselves, producing a “total archive”.103 Von Amelunxen suggests that this “would become the sanctuary of history, uniting non-synchronous events in the synchronicity of reproduction”.104 I turn next, in Part II, to compilations that similarly try to make a non-synchronous series synchronously present.

Conclusions Photography was far from being an isolated new medium in the mid-­ nineteenth century. Instead, it remediated the conventions of various painted genres and was in its turn extensively remediated into news illustrations, panoramas, history paintings and engravings. The case study of the Crimean War has shown that both photographer Roger Fenton and nurse-hotelier (and later autobiographer) Mary Seacole were highly conscious of the challenges of gaining an effective overview on the war, either from too far behind the front line or from within its midst. What they felt was needed in addition was panoramic elevation, to combine fragmentary impressions into the effect of a coherent whole. That is what Thomas Barker sought to do in his history painting—unremarkable in effect, but distinctive in method—produced back in Britain from a composite of Fenton’s on-the-spot photographs. Such composite photographic  See Jardine and Drage, “The Total Archive.”  Hubertus von Amelunxen, “The Century’s Memorial: Photography and the Recording of History,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michael Frizot (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 143. 103 104

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techniques continued throughout the century for paintings, for naturalistic “composition photography” and for upfront photo-montages, and these mostly required keys to enable viewers to identify and make sense of the various components. Larger scale photographic compilations, however, could not be represented in any single image, and these took the form of photographic surveys and collections. These sought to preserve the present (and surviving artifacts from the past) for a projected posterity. As we have just seen, the logical extreme of this would be a photographic archive whose capacity to offer both overview and 3D immersion would supersede even those of the world itself. As we will see in Part II, such utopian compilation projects were notably common in the latter half of the nineteenth century and dealt in fascinating ways with (inevitably) not meeting those aspirations. Panoramic perspective compiles multiple details and impressions into a singular whole where those elements become foreground, middle ground and background, or (in framed paintings like Barker’s) center and peripheries. By contrast, compilations bring their elements together in different forms, sometimes exhibited around the walls of a room, sometimes hinged together in a book or album, or piled in a storage box, but rarely all visible (or digestible) at once. While we might see this as a limitation, the rearrange-­ability of compilations means that they can be played around with. As we will see in Part II, in reading the digest periodical Review of Reviews, or collective biographies ranging from the ephemeral Men of the Time to the notionally definitive Dictionary of National Biography, users could dip in and out of their component parts in a myriad of permutations. There are as many routes through these publications as there are readers.

PART III

Big Data: Compilations of Contemporaneity

CHAPTER 6

An Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data Compilations and the Review of Reviews

Big data projects that attempted to take huge volumes of information and synthesize it into manageable compilations for readers became prolific in the late nineteenth century. They addressed broad scopes and used would­be scientific methods to offer ambitious overviews on various aspects of their contemporary era, but were all attempts to achieve overview through quantity. As I outline in the first half of this chapter, these could be compilations of things or of populations. As others have traced, they could also be compilations of language, as attempted by the Oxford English Dictionary (1879–1928)1; of images, like the late-nineteenth-century photographic

1  On the OED, see K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the “Oxford English Dictionary” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Sarah Ogilvie, Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kelly Kistner, “‘A Word Factory Was Wanted’: Organizational Objectivity in the Making of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 6 (2013): 801–28; Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of the Language (London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Peter Gilliver, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_6

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survey movement2; or of literature, as attempted by the anthology genre.3 In Part II, I focus on compilations of contemporary lives and events. The three projects I examine here addressed topical events, eminent living people and eminent deceased people, respectively. The latter half of this chapter discusses W.  T. Stead’s monthly periodical, the Review of Reviews (1890 onward), which aimed to provide an overview on each month’s topical issues. The two subsequent chapters (Chaps. 7 and 8) address collective biographical dictionaries, which compiled short biographical entries on a plethora of individuals. There I examine two types of collective biography projects. Chapter 7 examines Men of the Time (1852–99), which depicted exclusively living people and was therefore inherently ephemeral. Chapter 8 explores the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901), which depicted exclusively deceased people and therefore could aim for greater longevity, but which nonetheless included a surprising number of very recent lives. Before any of these case studies, however, we need to understand how widespread was the drive to compile and on what bases it was undertaken.

A Brief History of Nineteenth-Century Compilation The late nineteenth-century turn to compilation was not the first such turn. Nor did it evolve smoothly out of its predecessors. Enlightenment encyclopedias including Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–72) and the Scottish Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) sought to be scientific, positivistic and methodical, serving as reference works. By contrast, in reaction to these, the Romantic Idealists Schelling, Schlegel and Hegel envisaged encyclopedias that would be not the compilation’s “mere assemblages of information” but a unifying, panoramic, all-encompassing overview.4 As Tilottama Rajan describes it, the Enlightenment model offers a 2  The movement’s premier historian describes it as having aimed to produce a “systematic […] archival base for the future”: Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, 2. 3  Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4  G. W. F. Hegel qtd. in Tilottama Rajan, “The Encyclopedia and the University of Theory: Idealism and the Organization of Knowledge,” Textual Practice 21, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 338.

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reference system that makes information “available for selective retrieval”; in contrast, the model Hegel delineated in his three-part Encyclopaedia trained the learner to hold a unified vision of knowledge in their own minds. This Romantic model was so ambitious as to be utopian: whereas compilations can be dipped into and consulted, Hegel’s type of systematic encyclopedia “is to be read in its (im)possible entirety”.5 Rajan nonetheless suggests that Hegel acknowledged the “interconnectedness and incompleteness of knowledge”, seeing learning as an ongoing dialectical and diachronic project, rather than a definitive or fixed compendium.6 This book does not examine these German Romantic projects close up, but the model they share with the panorama and with panoramic contemporary history writing (in contrast to the compilation’s “assemblage of information” for “selective retrieval”) is one of holistic unity. At mid-century, the iconic material manifestation of the drive to compile was the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, which was reiterated throughout the subsequent imperial century in International Exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh, in Paris, Chicago and beyond. The Great Exhibition sought to be panoramic, but its effects—though awe-­ inspiring—were arguably rather those of the undigested compilation. What it offered was “infinite particularity, a sublime of heterogeneity”, and although “comprehensive”, it was “incomprehensible” in its overwhelming multiplicity.7 The “Official Catalogue” that promised textual clarity was “found to be as bewildering as the exhibition itself”.8 Mini-­ panoramas, in the form of fold-out panoramic friezes from the Illustrated London News, and “telescopic” peep-shows sold as souvenirs, offered alternative routes to master this profusion via temporary immersion in a miniaturized version of it.9  Rajan, 338.  Rajan, 336. 7  Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880, 147; Tatiana Holway, A Capital Idea: Dickens, Speculation, and the Victorian Economies of Representation, Dissertation (Columbia University, 2002). 8  Audrey Jaffe, “On the Great Exhibition,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (blog), March 2012, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_ articles=audrey-jaffe-on-the-great-exhibition. 9  “Grand Panorama Of The Great Exhibition. No. I. South-East Portion Of The Nave,” Illustrated London News, November 22, 1851, British Newspaper Archive; Rawlins, “Lane’s Telescopic View of the Ceremony of Her Majesty Opening the Great Exhibition of All Nations” (C. A. Lane, 1851), Johns Hopkins University Special Collections, https://www. flickr.com/photos/hopkinsarchives/4683027062/in/album-72157624065550315/. 5 6

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At the same time, a parallel project with very different aims was taking place over in the poorer districts of London. The inspired but erratic journalist, former Punch editor and dramatist Henry Mayhew began his social survey of poverty in the capital via articles in the Morning Chronicle newspaper (1849–50), then as pamphlets and latterly as volumes under the title of London Labour and the London Poor (four volumes, 1851–52, 1861–62). This project aspired to the sublime condition of a panorama, and in one of Mayhew’s articles, he describes ascending to the dome of St Paul’s cathedral to get a “bird’s eye view” of London. Although the city was inevitably obscured by smoke, he suggests that “with only glimpses of its greatness visible, it had a much more sublime and ideal effect from the very inability to grasp the whole of its literal reality”, making an attractive Romantic sublimity out of the challenge of comprehensive overview. 10 Mayhew’s project also aspired to the condition of a would-be-scientific compilation, shaped by his data. His survey of “slopwork and needlework”, for instance, includes a detailed table of the numbers of people involved in each branch of the trade, followed by calculations to deduct those “in business for themselves” to ascertain that of the remainder, “considerably more than three fourths, or no less than 28,577, are females under twenty years of age”.11 In line with this level of precision, in one letter he apologized to readers that “I am unable to generalize” on a topic due to “not being acquainted with the particulars”.12 Eileen Yeo describes him as an “anthropologist” and “relentless classifier”, although these two descriptors arguably pull in slightly different directions, one emphasizing attentive observation, the second an urge to codify.13 Mayhew himself declared, in the preface to his first volume, the aim to compile a “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis”, where this label both referenced and subverted Knight’s Cyclopaedia of the 10  Henry Mayhew, “Labour and The Poor,” Morning Chronicle, April 11, 1850, 5, British Newspaper Archive. Qtd. Henry Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50, ed. E.  P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 114–15. 11  Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, 195–96. Passage originally from Letter 11 in Morning Chronicle, November 23, 1849. 12  Henry Mayhew, “Labour and The Poor,” Morning Chronicle, October 26, 1849, 5, British Newspaper Archive. Also qtd. Eileen Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” in The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50, ed. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 62. 13  Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator,” 63, 77.

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Industry of All Nations (1851): that book celebrated the objects produced for the Great Exhibition, whereas Mayhew’s turned to look at producers themselves.14 London Labour and the London Poor, however, became more than an encyclopedia. Mayhew’s preface declared it “the first attempt to publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves”, and he can be seen as presaging 1960s labor historians’ turn to oral history interviewing.15 Natalie Prizel has argued that Mayhew’s exuberant wealth of interview material always exceeded and overflowed any “taxonomy” he tried to place it into. His interview accounts are indeed full of memorable particulars, from the maker of “penny theatrical characters” whose anxious, harried voice is audible as he repeatedly affirms that “I will tell not prices or secrets”, to Mayhew’s description of a toy-maker interviewee “interrupted now and then by the delivery of orders, given, of course, in the usual way and tone of business, but sounding very grandiloquent—‘A dozen large steamers’, ‘Two dozen waggons’”. He even relates how slop-workers, unable to afford fuel or warm clothes of their own, “often went to bed, I was told, with the sleeves of the coat they were making drawn over their arms”, a detail that Charles Kingsley immediately adopted for his novel Alton Locke (1850).16 In addition, recent scholarship has traced the complex two-way relationship between Mayhew and his informants—partly through the “Answers to Correspondents” section of his pamphlets— making those pamphlets a dynamic, disputed and never definitive space.17 Some scientific projects at the time used the panoramic rather than the compilation model. Evolutionary epics such as Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) “attempted to provide the viewer with a privileged bird’s-eye perspective of a scene of grandeur”. So, 14  Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, vol. 1 (London: G. Newbold, 1851), iii, http://archive.org/details/b20415606_001; George Dodd, Knight’s Cyclopædia of the Industry of All Nations (London: C. Knight, 1851), http://archive.org/details/knightscyclopd00doddrich. 15  Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1:iii. 16  Mayhew, The Unknown Mayhew, 352, 339, 257. The passages are, respectively, drawn from Letters 38, 37 and 16 in Morning Chronicle, from February 25, 1850; February 21, 1850; December 11, 1849. 17  Bertrand Taithe, The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996). See also Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe, “Henry Mayhew at 200—the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 4 (December 1, 2014): 481–96.

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in Bernard Lightman’s view, “the evolutionary epic can be seen as the literary twin of the panorama”.18 These epics covered a huge timespan, reaching far back into deep time, so while they are obviously very different to contemporary history panorama paintings, they share something with the narrative extrapolations of panoramic perspective discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4. These epics tended to be based on faith in a higher purpose, whether that be Christian, Spiritualist (for Alfred Russel Wallace and popularizer Arabella Buckley) or Positivist, which made them more unitary in ethos and aesthetics than most compilations. By the mid nineteenth century, however, ideals were starting to shift, and Lightman notes that after this time, the panoramic mode of overview was used more by popularizers than by the research scientists themselves.19 Up to the mid nineteenth century, the predominantly practiced form of objectivity was what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison term a principle of “truth to nature”, in which the scientist’s judgment was used to distinguish between accidental, particular details and the underlying regular generalizable patterns. They describe the judgment process as one of “idealization” in the service of clarity and explanatory “taxonomy”.20 We can also gloss this principle as one of seeking orderly overview on the disorderly details of the natural world. Daston and Galison carefully chart the transition from one principle of scientific objectivity to another and argue that the pre-existing ideal of “truth to nature” gave way to what they term “mechanical objectivity” from the 1860s and 1870s. This new model argued for suppression of subjectivity, in which the individual will (previously seen as necessary to synthesize and cohere a mass of unruly detail) became something to be suppressed in the service of the data itself.21 According to this model of objectivity, the practitioner was encouraged to stay immersed in the detail and to resist trying to see the big picture since that could introduce the biases of subjectivity. Although Daston and Galison resist such a narrative, this shift in approaches to objectivity can be seen as a response to the “avalanche of numbers” that Theodore Porter

18  Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 222. 19  Bernard Lightman, 222–23. 20  Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 15, 11. 21  Daston and Galison, 228–31.

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and Ian Hacking have argued became powerful in modernizing states after 1815.22 By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the balance between panorama and compilation models of overview had shifted notably. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (seventeen volumes, 1889–1903) demonstrates some of the benefits, and constraints, of the compilation approach. The Liverpool shipping magnate began his ambitious project with some of the same motivations as Mayhew, but quite different methods and means of presentation. In his new attempt to measure and analyze London poverty, Booth drew on information from School Board visitors, who visited and recorded details of all the households in poor areas whose children were obliged to attend the recently established state-funded schools. From this partial (even proxy) measure Booth extrapolated: from the number of fathers of schoolchildren, he estimated an equivalent total of married men without children, and of unmarried men; he assumed that schoolchildren imply other younger and older siblings, so added numbers of infants and young people aged thirteen to twenty; and that fathers’ poverty approximates to men’s poverty more generally.23 He commented that “of the wealth of my material I have no doubt. I am indeed embarrassed by its mass, and by my resolution to make use of no fact to which I cannot give a quantitative value”.24 However, Booth was not straightforwardly or solely Positivist, and like W. T. Stead, as we will see, his principles and motivations were highly “moralreligious”.25 Booth had himself done some first-hand ethnographic research for the project, and the notebooks from which he gleaned his data were rich with qualitative as well as quantitative information. This occasionally (but only occasionally) surfaced into the final text, such as in his frustrated and wry 22  Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theodore M. Porter, “Statistics and the Career of Public Reason: Engagement and Detachment in a Quantified World,” in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. Thomas H. Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2010), 32–47. 23  Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, vol. 1 (London, 1889), 4–5, http:// archive.org/details/labourlifeofpeop01bootuoft. 24  Booth, 1:6. 25  Thomas R. C. Gibson-Brydon, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable, ed. Hillary Kaell and Brian Lewis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 4.

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description of a family who live “from hand to mouth”, and “every week put in and take out of pawn the same set of garments, on which the broker every time advances 16s, charging the, no doubt, reasonable sum of 4d for the accommodation”.26 Rosemary O’Day and David Englander emphasize that Booth valued both the quantitative and qualitative, quoting a letter to Beatrice Potter where he wrote that “the statistical method was needed to give bearings to the results of personal observation or personal observation to give life to statistics”.27 Booth also did not necessarily share his readers’ perception of Life and Labour as “a permanent work of reference”, viewing it instead as “provisional”, since what he could publish was only a fraction of the rich and varied evidence in the notebooks.28 He thus recognized that taken as a whole, the project was irreducible to any uniform compilation. Nonetheless, social and epistemological priorities had shifted sufficiently, in the intervening decades since Mayhew’s project, that Booth prioritized the types of data that could be compiled. Lawrence Goldman has traced how liberals harnessed and championed the power of statistics in order to advance social reforms in the central decades of the nineteenth century. He argues that by the late century those were being overtaken by eugenicist projects, and we can see elements of both impulses in Booth’s work.29 Some of Booth’s proposals for dealing with chronic poverty mixed utopianism and authoritarianism, as he suggested taking the “very poor” under state supervision, though less for their benefit than to protect the classes directly above them.30 More impactful were Booth’s concept of a poverty line (further refined by Joseph Rowntree and others), and his spectacular set of choropleth maps of London, color-coded by gradation to indicate the poverty-to-wealth level of each and every street. The format of the maps—ichnographic (top-down) rather than from a human-­ level elevation—is that of the compilation rather than the panorama. They provide an overview, although like all of the examples in this study, they are readable less from a distance than via immersion: as Franco Moretti has  Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 1:142. Italics in original.  Charles Booth to Beatrice Potter, 27 July 1886. The British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, Passfield Papers, II.i.(II), 8. Qtd. Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 35. 28  O’Day and Englander, 22, 24. 29  Goldman, Victorians and Numbers, xxiii–xxiv. 30  Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 1:162–63. 26 27

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pointed out, the macro-level findings—that the West End is wealthy and the East End poor—are unsurprising, but at the micro-level they expose the frequent proximity of wealth and poverty in adjacent streets.31 The maps nonetheless give an abstracted, schematic view of the city, intended to convey statistics rather than spectacle. They thus stand as a useful epitome (especially in their subtle similarities to, but distinction from, the panorama) of the compilation model. Daston and Galison’s model of “mechanical objectivity” maps on to some (but not all) aspects of some (but not all) of the compilation projects I examine in this part. The biographical dictionary Men of the Time, the subject of Chap. 7 was never sufficiently programmatic or coherent to even claim that approach. By contrast, as I show in Chap. 8 , the Dictionary of National Biography’s editors exhorted contributors to write in the style of the funeral instruction “no flowers, by request”, and to confine themselves to “the most condensed statement consistent with fullness of information”, both of which emphasize attention to detail over the eulogistic or long view.32 However, contributors’ contracts also specified that “discussions of points of controversy should be as terse and decisive as possible”.33 This approach is closer to a third form of objectivity, “trained judgement”, that Daston and Galison argue supplemented mechanical objectivity from the early twentieth century by bringing “intuitive thinking” back into combination with “patience and industry”.34 Even further from mechanical objectivity is the subject of this chapter’s case study, the Review of Reviews periodical, which was proudly the brainchild of entrepreneur-journalist W. T. Stead’s very dominant personality and bore the mark of his priorities on every page.

31  Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London; New  York: Verso, 1999), 78. 32  Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 84. Leslie Stephen, contract for C.  L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, 19 November 1889, University of London Special Collections MS900/5. 33  Sidney Lee, contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB by 20 December 1891, University of London Special Collections MS900/6. 34  Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 18, 312.

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Big Data and Compilations Twenty-first-century big data projects are designed around the overview(s) that they can enable.35 The individual data points themselves are relatively insignificant, in the sense that they are indistinguishable and anonymized. By contrast, in nineteenth-century compilations, while the rhetorical emphasis is on their grand ambition, the reader’s or user’s attention is directed to the component pieces. Whereas panoramas promise either a single all-encompassing vision or a continuous flow of tableaux, compilations intrinsically lack connections between their component parts, requiring us to take in and digest each component separately. Recent discussions of “historicizing big data” focus on statistical uses of aggregated data. Within a special issue of the history of science journal Osiris, for instance, Dan Bouk uses the distinction between “data doubles” (information tied to an individual, such as credit ratings or centralized test scores) and “data aggregates” (a second-stage statistical abstraction from those doubles), to suggest that the nineteenth century “saw the reign of aggregates derived from doubles”.36 Similarly, Maeve Adams claims that “[Victorian statistical] aggregation presumed that to know features of the collective was to know something meaningful about each and every individual, and vice versa”.37 The late nineteenth-century compilations examined in this part, however, do not assume that each individual example tells us about the collective. The composite periodical digests and collective biographies I examine in detail here do not even necessarily aggregate: they remain as mosaics. That lack of aggregation was not necessarily a choice. None of these projects chose to take an avant-­ garde sledgehammer to a pre-existing coherent narrative, turning it into a mosaic of fragments for the reader to re-compile. Instead, in the absence of any pre-existing codified narrative about the contemporary era, each project was built up as a compilation of tiny and disparately composed  Aronova, Oertzen, and Sepkoski, “Introduction.”  Dan Bouk, “The History and Political Economy of Personal Data over the Last Two Centuries in Three Acts,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (September 2017): 87, https://doi. org/10.1086/693400. The term “data double” was coined by Kevin D.  Haggerty and Richard V.  Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22. 37  Maeve Adams, “Numbers and Narratives: Epistemologies of Aggregation in British Statistics and Social Realism, c. 1790–1880,” in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. Thomas H.  Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2010), 104. 35 36

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parts, produced serially over time, and (in the case of the collective biographies) in alphabetical rather than chronological order. All three of the projects I focus on in Part II—Stead’s Review of Reviews, and the very different collective biographies Men of the Time and the Dictionary of National Biography—navigated their overwhelming volume of material via a pipeline of successive processes: • Selection (Stead chose particular articles from the periodical press, while the collective biographers chose lives from the current or recent population). • Reduction and homogenization (Stead distilled those articles to a summary and a few choice excerpts; the collective biographers distilled those lives to a terse chronological account of experiences, actions and achievements deemed worth recording in a reference work, though neither Men of the Time or the DNB ever quite achieved homogeneity across its many and varying-sized entries). • Aggregation (all the projects combined multiple of these short summaries into a compilation of similar instances). • Finding aids (indexes in the case of Review of Reviews; an alphabetical structure in the case of the collective biographies). These processes were designed to make big data manageable, and— unlike most twenty-first-century big data projects—to make it accessible to, and navigable, by ordinary readers. These compilations were also products of collaboration. Although we have seen that panorama paintings were highly public and sociable spectacles, the Hegelian ideal of the panoramic overview—and the one adopted by writers from Carlyle to Barrett Browning and Hardy—is that of Friedrich’s lone “Wanderer above a sea of fog”, gaining a self-generated overview. By contrast, all the case studies I examine were collaborative enterprises and (like most of the scientific atlases studied by Daston and Galison) only achievable through collective endeavor.38 The same was true of both Mayhew’s and Booth’s social surveys, but an important indicator of the shift in attitudes to team projects in the intervening decades is that Mayhew kept relatively quiet about the involvement of fellow interviewers and writers, whereas Booth proudly acknowledged the collective efforts of

 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 26.

38

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his team as a sign of both scale and rigor. Even Stead, the dominant figurehead and driving force behind Review of Reviews, needed assistants. The case studies were also all projects of the British imperial age and were affected by the same presumptions of British (and metropolitan) centrality. As Jardine and Drage put it, in a recent reflection on the “total archive”, there are “obvious political, geographical and cultural limitations to schemes for ‘universal’ knowledge, which quickly come to look all too local from our lofty post-modern, post-colonial vantage point”.39 In the Review of Reviews, arch-imperialist and Commonwealth enthusiast Stead celebrated international collaboration and global reach (his front cover image showed a globe encircled by the periodical’s title in an implicit reference to Puck’s Midsummer’s Night Dream “girdle round the Earth in forty minutes”, an image also often borrowed for telegraphy) but placed Britain and white civilization at its center.40 Men of the Time similarly claimed to be cosmopolitan but after an initial joint UK-US edition it primarily focused on Britain. The non-specific “nation” of Dictionary of National Biography gave it latitude to include settlers in and influences on Britain, but this choice of title was also arguably rooted in an assumption of unspoken British centrality. These projects also navigated the hostages to fortune that ensued from being historical statements issued in one soon-superseded historical moment; Jardine and Drage call this the “pathology of the universal: the way in which those who conceive schemes for the organization of universal knowledge enter into an uneasy bargain with the future”.41 The Review of Reviews and Men of the Time dealt with this issue by becoming serial publications that only asserted an ephemeral lifespan; the Dictionary of National Biography, while also published sequentially, promised in some ways to be definitive, giving it a somewhat more “uneasy bargain with the future”. The remainder of this chapter takes as its case study a project that specifically sought to offer a compiled overview on contemporary events, remediated through the format of periodical articles into the form of another periodical: W.  T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, founded in 1890. 39  Jardine and Drage, “The Total Archive,” 10. They refer back to Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, 21. 40  A firm believer in a federated commonwealth, Stead went on to found an American Review of Reviews in 1891, and an Australian edition in 1892. 41  Jardine and Drage, “The Total Archive,” 10.

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How, then, did the Review of Reviews attempt to produce a compilation of contemporary events and knowledge, and how did it articulate the challenges of doing so? First, I show how it represented its contemporary era and then the innovative techniques it developed to serve as a compilation.

The Review of Reviews: A Compilation of Contemporary History Before the 1802 foundation of the Edinburgh Review and its many nineteenth-­ century imitators, rivals and successors, review periodicals attempted unsuccessfully to be comprehensive. They attempted to acknowledge and accommodate all new publications, and partly as a result, those such as the English Review (1783–96) and Analytical Review (1788–99) were short-lived. As Joanne Shattock puts it, these precursors attempted to incorporate even publications that they did not have time or space to properly review, “cramming what could not be reviewed into a series of short notices”.42 By contrast, the Edinburgh Review was “unashamedly selective and elitist”, claiming the authority to sift the literary field for its readers, and to deal with the chaff by ignoring it.43 This practice became standard among the monthly and quarterly reviews. By contrast, in his 1890s Review of Reviews Stead took a very different approach to the challenge of comprehensiveness, seeking again to represent everything, but to do so by a second-order process of sifting, offering both a digest of other periodicals’ content and digested versions of their key articles. Stead was fascinated by the potential of compilation throughout his career. In his first post as a newspaper editor, at the Northern Echo in the 1870s, he took the common editorial practice of “scann[ing] the daily press for potential copy” up to “an industrial scale” in trawling newspapers and government blue-books for relevant articles that he would compile into scrapbooks.44 Although the Review of Reviews was Stead’s first foray from newspapers into periodicals, its use of compilation was a natural 42  Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1989), 4. 43  Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland, 7. 44  Tony Nicholson, “The Provincial Stead,” in W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (London: British Library, 2012), 11.

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progression for him. It was also not a novel concept in the late nineteenth century. So-called scissors-and-paste journalism was widespread, both in the form of paid-for and accredited reprints from other sources and that of unacknowledged copying. While George Newnes’ Tit-Bits (established 1881) fell into the latter category, Stead’s Review of Reviews was designed around the former principle, serving to channel the acknowledged products of other periodicals into the hands of readers, via summarizing and excerpting. When the Review of Reviews launched in January 1890, Stead made explicit his vision of it as a compilation or “compendium”. In the opening editorial manifesto, he declared: In the mighty maze of modern periodical literature, the busy man wanders confused, not knowing exactly where to find the precise article that he requires, and often, after losing all his scanty time in the search, he departs unsatisfied. It is the object of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS to supply a clue to that maze in the shape of a readable compendium of all the best articles in the magazines and reviews.45

This metaphor visualizes the magazine as something equivalent to the thread given by Ariadne to Theseus to aid his quest for the minotaur and even more importantly to find his way out through the labyrinth again. It is also something more: instead of offering a fairy-tale golden thread, the periodical serves as a map. It is this “compendium” function, acting as a survey that offers an overview on a miniaturized periodical press, that I focus on here. The inaugural editorial explicitly envisages Review of Reviews as providing a solution to the problem of excess information. Stead opens: “Of the making of magazines there is no end. There are already more periodicals than any one can find time to read. That is why I have to-day added another to the list. For the new comer is not a rival, but rather an index and a guide to all those already in existence”. He thus sets the Review of Reviews apart to serve as a paratextual handbook to those others, a meta-­ distance apart from those and thus implicitly superior in aims. As Stead later described his project on the launch of its Australian edition in 1892,

 W. T. Stead, “Programme,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 14.

45

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the Review of Reviews might fruitfully be thought of as a chemical process, “distilling” the “periodicals of the world” in a “crucible”.46 For Stead, selection was a crucial step in the process of history writing and involved forgetting as well as of recording. His imagery for this, which is simultaneously modest and grandiose, echoes that of professionalizing historians such as William Stubbs, who declared in his inaugural lecture as Oxford’s Regius Professor of History (1867) that he was merely a “worker at history”.47 Stead’s equivalent declaration in his opening editorial reads: All but the supremely excellent fades into oblivion and is forgotten. The first step towards remembering what is worth while storing in the mind is to forget that which is worthless lumber. The work of winnowing away the chaff and of revealing the grain is the humble but useful task of the editorial thresher.48

This rhetoric somewhat paradoxically both places trust in hindsight and places responsibility on the shoulders of contemporaries. On the one hand, Stead poetically implies that time will naturally clarify the distinction between “chaff” and “grain”, in a way that echoes Emerson’s review of Carlyle’s Past and Present that we examined in Chap. 3. On the other hand, it suggests that if we want to understand contemporary history while it is still taking place, we need to apply immediate and intensive human labor to the task. Stead’s top-down aim to supply what he terms “the best thoughts of the wisest” to “the busiest and poorest” readers notably echoes Matthew Arnold’s faith in “the best that has been thought and said”.49 Arnold was famously hostile toward the New Journalism (characterized by its personal tone, typographical boldness and new features such as interviews and gossip columns),50 but Richard Menke has shown that Arnold, Stead and his one-­time collaborator Newnes were all fascinated by the potential of the excerpted passage (the “touchstone” in 46  W. T. Stead, “Our Australian Edition and Its Cover,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 30 (June 1892): 608. A proposed cover illustration featuring this crucible distillation is shown a few pages later (610). 47  On this, see Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 39. 48  Stead, “Programme.” 49  Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 70. On Stead vs. Arnold (and the way that Stead used Arnold’s vocal hostility as useful publicity), see Nicholson, “The Provincial Stead,” 8, 16–17. 50  Owen Mulpetre, “W.  T. Stead and the New Journalism” (University of Teesside, 2010), 4–5.

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Arnold’s model, the “tit-bit” for Newnes or the threshed “grain” for Stead) to provide a high-road to “insight”.51 This mutual interest indicates a commitment from all three—however different their approaches—to the value of the compilation. Stead believed that compilation could only be achieved from a position of overview and by a strong leader (him). His 1886 articles on “Government by Journalism” and “The Future of Journalism” see the periodical editor as a “prophet” analogous to those in the Old Testament and to those earlier Victorian prophetic voices Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold: an evangelical role he had been searching for ever since the 1870s.52 Julia Kristeva’s three models of temporality are all relevant to periodicals, as Margaret Beetham has shown: the linear “masculine” date-­ stamped time, the cyclical “feminine” time of the serial and the “monumental” time of Christian teleology.53 Stead was committed to prophesy both in the evangelical sense focused on eternity and in the chronological sense focused on cutting-edge contemporary history. Stead’s imagined position of potent overview on events is visible in the strong political agendas he pushes in Review of Reviews, his sense of self-­ importance and complete lack of interest in impartiality. The “Character Sketch” editorial for January 1892, for instance, evaluates the Russian Tsar Alexander III and closes with Stead’s own recommendations for improving the regime through greater liberalism.54 He then adds, in 51  Richard Menke, “Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 4 (2014): 568. On the difference between Newnes and Stead, see Graham Law and Matthew Sterenberg, “Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 16 (March 22, 2013): pt. IV paragraph 1, https://doi.org/10.16995/ ntn.657. 52  W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 49 (May 1886): 654, 664. On his long search for a life mission, see W. T. Stead, “Journal Entry (July 4, 1875),” The W.T. Stead Resource Site, accessed March 15, 2021, https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/ letters/journal2.php. Journal entry also quoted in J. W. Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper; an Account of the Temperaments, Perturbations and Achievements of John Morley, W. T. Stead, E. T. Cook, Harry Cust, J. L. Garvin, and Three Other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette (London: Methuen, 1952), 102–3. 53  Margaret Beetham, “Time: Periodicals and the Time of the Now,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 333. See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 13–35. 54  W. T. Stead, “Character Sketch: January. Alexander III., Tsar of All the Russias,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 25 (January 1892): 27.

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something of an understatement: “The Emperor Alexander III is not likely, I fear, to move in the direction which I have indicated”. Similarly, commenting in the following month’s “Progress of the World” editorial on the death of the Khedive of Egypt, Stead declares that “we [the British] will withdraw our garrison as soon as any competent responsible Englishman reports that our work is accomplished, and that its permanence will not be imperilled by the retirement of the redcoats. But not one moment before; and after our troops have gone it must be clearly understood that they will go back again at a moment’s notice if their presence if needed”.55 All of this is written as an ultimatum, as if Stead himself had power in this domain. He also proudly trumpeted the impact of other newspapers and periodicals, even those whose politics he disagreed with. Reporting on the results of the 1892 General Election, he argues that Joseph Chamberlain’s success was due to “Mr Bunce, the editor of the Birmingham Post. […] Not Mr. Chamberlain but Mr. Bunce is the real hero of the elections”.56 “Government by Journalism” indeed. Despite Stead’s demagogic rhetoric, however, the Review of Reviews was a fundamentally collaborative venture, in two senses. For one, it was not the solitary labor it sometimes appeared: he relied on an office of predominantly female co-writers and researchers and the editorship temporarily passed surreptitiously to his brother Francis when Stead himself had a breakdown in 1895.57 Even more fundamentally, it was designed as “participatory journalism”.58 Stead’s innovative ideas on this score ranged from him as Agony Aunt, and a “Magazine Exchange” with him as broker in a swap system, to an ambitious network of an “Association of Helpers”,

55  W.  T. Stead, “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 26 (February 1892): 113–20. 56  W.  T. Stead, ed., “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 32 (August 1892): 106. 57  On the female staff, see Alexis Easley, “W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews,” in W.T.  Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et  al. (London: British Library, 2012), 37–58. On Francis Stead’s temporary editorship, see Gowan Dawson, “The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain,” in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, ed. Geoffrey Cantor et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 175. 58  Hale, “2014 VanArsdel Prize Essay.” For the longer-term use of this model, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Markovits, “Rushing Into Print.”

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though uptake was never as high as he had hoped.59 And his sense of reciprocity and participation extended to the explicit medium of contemporary-­ history-­writing. In June 1890 he launched a competition for a “Scholarship of Contemporary History,” designed to fund the university education of one woman under 30, along with several smaller awards. The subjects for examination were drawn from the past six-months’ worth of the Review of Reviews’ own articles, and in January 1891 over 100 candidates entered at examination centers across Britain and Ireland, India, South Africa and Demerara.60 The results were announced in May 1891, and the following month featured an article about the backgrounds and aspirations of the winning candidates, along with their photographs and excerpts from their letters to Stead.61 Along with many other fund-raising and philanthropic campaigns run via Review of Reviews, this was a material way in which the periodical could intervene and make substantive difference to its readers’ lives—and it was explicitly framed as requiring a (compilatory) knowledge of contemporary history. Stead saw Review of Reviews as the first step in a process of history writing. James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor, and Laurel Brake, rightly say that his primary engagement was with current affairs, but their interpretations do not sufficiently acknowledge Stead’s historical ambitions. Mussell and Paylor suggest that Stead “challenges the connection between value and permanence” by “locating value in the transitory, ephemeral media of the

59  W. T. Stead, “A Practical Suggestion.,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 76; W. T. Stead, “The Suggested Magazine Exchange,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 99. On uptake, see W. T. Stead, “The Response to ‘A Practical Suggestion,’” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 108; W. T. Stead, “After Five Years: To Our Readers,” Review of Reviews, January 1895, 3. Stead nonetheless launched more such initiatives that same year. See “Circulating Libraries for Villages,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 353; “The Masterpiece Library - Preliminary Announcement,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 386. On the latter initiative, see Tom Lockwood, “W. T. Stead’s ‘Penny Poets’: Beyond Baylen,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 16 (April 23, 2013), https:// doi.org/10.16995/ntn.655. 60  W. T. Stead, “The Scholarship of Contemporary History,” Review of Reviews 3, no. 14 (February 1891): 140. 61  W. T. Stead, “The Scholarship for [sic] Contemporary History: The Award,” The Review of Reviews 3, no. 17 (May 1891): 440; W.  T. Stead, “The Scholarship of Contemporary History. Some Account of the Successful Competitors,” The Review of Reviews 3, no. 18 (June 1891): 546–47. The two winners were Blanche Oram (a writer who adopted the pseudonym Roma White) and Helen Bayes (a teacher).

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periodical press”.62 Similarly, Brake suggests that although the magazine “appeared after what it digested”, “its function” in keeping readers “abreast of periodical contents” was “allegedly prospective”.63 However, a less contorted rationale can emerge if rather than thinking of Review of Reviews as retrospectively “prospective”, we see it as a very first draft of contemporary history. Building on Wai-Chee Dimock’s sense of a transnational “deep time”, Helena Goodwyn affirms that Stead “did not consider the value of his new periodical to be transitory or ephemeral”.64 Instead, she proposes that Stead envisioned a kind of “deep present”, in which his efforts “could erase boundaries of time and space between nations and between the necessarily periodical nature of periodical publication”.65 I would add that Stead’s “deep present” also projected into the future and tried to imagine how posterity might interpret and use his periodical. The periodical’s “Diary” feature helps to demonstrate these historical ambitions. Stead included it from July 1890, as a three-column page of closely packed text that, on first glance, looks like a schedule or an advertisement for upcoming events. In fact, the page’s heading, such as “Diary for June”, is the name of the preceding month and these events are all in the past, making it a diary of record rather than of future appointments (in September 1890, e.g. we are told: “4. [August] Bank holiday; fine day”). These one-page recapitulations of “events of the month” include events that have taken place around the world (June 1890 had seen “Queensland Parliament opened at Brisbane”, and “Agreement arrived at by Anti-­ Slavery Trade Conference at Brussels”), a “Parliamentary Record”, “Utterances, Notable and Otherwise” and “Obituary”.66 What on first glance appears a numbered list turns out to indicate the dates in the month when things have happened, turning this into a modern version of the medieval annal form. At the very least it offers readers a chance to recap 62  James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor, “Mapping the ‘Mighty Maze’: Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 1 (October 1, 2005): 1, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.437. 63  Laurel Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism: W. T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching,’” in Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, ed. Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 172; Laurel Brake, “Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903,” in W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (London: British Library, 2012), 78. 64  Helena Goodwyn, The Americanisation of W. T. Stead (in preparation), ch. 2. 65  Goodwyn, Introduction. 66  “Diary for June,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 13.

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the main public events of the past month (as selected by Stead and his team). At a further remove, perhaps annually combined with the other months’ “diary” pages in a compiled volume publication, it could serve as a useful reference tool for a would-be contemporary historian. We can also learn from it Stead’s view of what counts as historic. The answer was primarily public and international affairs: for example, here is the list of events that had taken place on 1 June 1892: News received of a revolution in Honduras on the 18th ult. News of a conspiracy in Honolulu on the 20th ult. Derby Day. Settlement of the Durham miners’ strike. Opening of the Chilian Congress.67

Following this list of events was a list of the month’s “notable utterances”, we read that those that occurred on 1 June 1892 were “Sir John Gorst, at Sheffield, on Home Rule. / Sir G. Trevelyan, at Glasgow, on the Liberal Party and the General Election”.68 This implied adherence to a great man theory of history, but it also indicated a broad public sphere that went beyond Hansard’s recording of statements in Parliament. In terms of usage, however, the list of utterances typically gave only single-­ phrase summaries of the topic addressed, and no clue of what was said about it. The list therefore functioned optimistically like an index, which a keen reader (or future historian) could endeavor to follow up via the local press. Stead was very upfront about the challenges of addressing contemporary history in ways that would go beyond ephemerality. Here is the opening of Stead’s editorial just before the July 1892 General Election: Never was the date of a General Election fixed more awkwardly for the unlucky chronicler who goes to press on the 1st of the month, and publishes on the 15th. For the first polls will open on July 4th, and the last constituency will vote on the 15th. Hence what is written before the first ballot is cast will be read after the last vote has been counted. Every calculation that is made to-day may be falsified before the printed page reaches the reader. Still the disadvantage is not without its compensations. Nothing is more interesting than to compare prophesies with results, especially if the prophecy is  “Diary for June,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 31 (July 1892): 10.  “Diary for June,” 11.

67 68

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enclosed in a sealed envelope, only to be opened after the result has been recorded. It is rather hard on the prophet, no doubt. But a prophet is not worth his salt if he is not prepared to face the test.69

This commentary engages the reader in the writing process and celebrates them as the possessor of hindsight and the arbiter of Stead’s predictions. Kate Jackson identifies how the Strand Magazine’s copy was written a month in advance, so that its claim to be of the moment was at best “a peculiar ahistorical contemporaneity”.70 By contrast, Stead here shows himself very conscious of the need to be upfront with his readers. Although he clearly wanted to write contemporary history, in this case he was constrained by his press deadline into writing prophesy instead. His determination to engage with the latest and most pressing events here trumps any desire for his statements to have longevity.

Innovative Compilation Practices in Review of Reviews As well as presenting Review of Reviews as a first draft of contemporary history, Stead explicitly presented it as a compilation. It promised to provide a digest of other periodicals’ contents, and did so through a series of selected highlights, carefully arranged in a hierarchy of diminishing scale. As a reader worked their way through the magazine, they would gain a sense of increasing distance from and overview on that content, as the sections became shorter and more closely compiled. Brake describes this as “a waterfall of various lists”.71 The exact image would be that of a tiered waterfall. After Stead’s editorial leader articles,72 the bulk of each issue was devoted to “Leading Articles in the Reviews”, followed by a section grouped under the periodical titles themselves, providing shorter summaries of further articles. In 1892 Stead added yet another new such feature—“Some Notable Articles” from periodicals otherwise unmentioned—

 W. T. Stead, “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 31 (July 1892): 3.  Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910 : Culture and Profit (London: Routledge, 2001), 116. 71  Brake, “Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903,” 83. 72  These included “Progress of the World,” “Diary” of the previous month, “Caricatures of the Month” and “Character Sketch.” 69 70

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since “every month we are more and more perplexed by the impossibility of covering the whole range of magazine literature”.73 To keep his summaries sufficiently brisk, Stead drew upon some of the more contentious techniques of New Journalism. The summaries of other periodicals’ content featured headlines (replacing the articles’ original and often more sedate titles) that we would nowadays characterize as “clickbait”. One blandly titled article on “Housekeeping Schools” became the more direct “A Plea for Housekeeping Schools”; a controversial piece shifted from its original discrete title “A Welcome Child” to “Against Compulsory Motherhood”.74 Sometimes the titles of summaries even tell us which way they point. These include “Is it ever right to get married? // No, by Count Tolstoi” and “Do Americans hate England? // No! by Mr Andrew Carnegie”.75 Stead has an inbuilt defense here against any potential accusations of melodramatic hype, because these headlines contain immediate summaries of their answers. The soundbite-like snippets give the reader a two-line summary of an article that they can then choose to read (or not) in full knowledge of its overall conclusion. The Review can thus promise to inform as well as intrigue. The scale of such distillations was miniaturized ever further as the reader traveled deeper through the magazine. The final “waterfall” tier, the “Contents of Reviews and Magazines at Home and Abroad”, gave no more than a list and can be best understood through another metaphor, that of the mosaic. In early issues of the Review of Reviews, this section took the form of a grid, where each mosaic square was a window onto another miniaturized contents page (see Fig. 6.1).76 Stead later made the row-dividers less regimented (placing them ad hoc rather than in uniform spacing) and then removed them completely so that the format became simply a three-column table enclosed in a

 W. T. Stead, “Some Notable Articles,” Review of Reviews 5, no. 29 (May 1892): 496.  “A Plea for Housekeeping Schools,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 366; “Against Compulsory Motherhood,” Review of Reviews, April 1895, 328. women’s rights campaigner Lady Henry Somerset 75  “Is It Ever Right to Get Married? No, by Count Tolstoi,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 30; “Do Americans Hate England? No! By Mr Andrew Carnegie,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 34. 76  W. T. Stead, “Contents of the Leading Reviews,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 28. 73 74

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Fig. 6.1  “Contents of the Leading Reviews”, The Review of Reviews, January 1890, 28. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, shelfmark Per. 3977 d.69

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border.77 Again like the “Diary” of “utterances”, this section was probably not expected to be read throughout, especially as the format became more crowded and compacted over time. Instead, like much of Review of Reviews, it was for reference at the time and posterity later. It was also (silently) selective, for example, only listing the longest serial story in Argosy each month. All these aspects can tell us something about Stead’s conception of the relationship between those other periodicals and his own. Matthew Philpotts suggests that visualizing periodicals’ textures can generate insights into their priorities.78 This mosaic grid-format makes a compilation not only of Review of Reviews’ own structure (the Review made up of other Reviews) but also the publications it gleans from. It makes of its twelve “Leading Reviews” a kind of leaderboard and portrays their contents as equivalent and comparable to one another. It also implicitly permits the reader to dip in and out of those other publications, envisaging them as reference works rather than cover-to-cover reads. Linda Hughes has suggested that monthly or quarterly periodicals could attain higher levels of order than weeklies or dailies, because with greater (interim) hindsight a “higher degree of shaping and planning [was] possible”, enabling greater selection and coherence.79 The monthly Review of Reviews did not have a great deal of time, but sought to offer that “order” visually and structurally instead. And by reducing into mosaic format even quarterly reviews (February 1890 selects the Asiatic Quarterly, Church Quarterly, Dublin, Edinburgh, English Historical, London Quarterly, Quarterly and Scottish reviews) alongside monthly ones, it implicitly undermined that higher level of internal coherence that Hughes suggests

77  The feature had a two-month hiatus in May–June 1890 when Stead experimented with devoting more space instead to continental European periodicals, before it returned in July 1890 with ad hoc row-dividers. There was another brief absence in August 1891, before the three-column format from September 1891. In this format it became increasingly lengthy (8 pages by January 1892), under the title of “The Contents of Reviews and Magazines at Home and Abroad.” 78  Matthew Philpotts, “Dimension: Fractal Forms and Periodical Texture,” Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (October 2, 2015): 403–27, https://doi.org/10.1353/ vpr.2015.0035. 79  Linda Hughes, “Turbulence in the ‘Golden Stream’: Chaos Theory and the Study of Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 119.

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quarterlies might otherwise achieve.80 For Stead, even these hallowed publications were ripe for dissection and extraction. Excerpting and summarizing were normal procedures for reviewers, as in the corollary genres of the anthology and the abridgement. As Nicholas Dames has shown, reviewers valued the excerpt for its ability to give the reader direct access to the affective texture and temporality of the original text.81 However, Leah Price has shown the anxiety this practice caused about the detachability of such passages, and the implication either that the overall work might lack organic unity or that the reader of such snippets would lose access to that organic unity.82 The latter fear was certainly present among the writers whom Stead dissected. Dawson has traced several occasions when Stead got into trouble for misrepresenting scientists’ work and ideas in Review of Reviews; on one particular occasion, Stead had to issue an official apology to T.  H. Huxley for misrepresenting him as anti-Christian.83 Such incidents dramatize how a so-called compilation could also be—and under Stead, in practice often was—brazenly trying to push various other agendas as well. The compilation drive of the Review of Reviews reached its apogee in Stead’s enthusiasm for indexing. He saw the practice as a vital tool to “deliver us” from “the present condition of darkness” caused not by absence of knowledge but rather (in words he quotes from Cardinal Manning) its “profusion […] more than we know how to use”, which we therefore need “to catalogue, sort, distribute, select, harmonize and complete”.84 Stead echoed George Eliot’s Mr Causabon in yearning for “A Key to the Realm of All Knowledge” and saw it in indexing, calling for both “An Office of Indexing” (as established by Nancy Bailey in 1892 in Bloomsbury) and a “A College of Indexers” to train more such experts.85 80  W.  T. Stead, ed., “Contents of the Leading Reviews,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 2 (February 1890): 109. 81  Nicholas Dames, “On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol,” in The Feeling of Reading, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 11–26. 82  Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. 83  W. T. Stead, “Culture and Current Orthodoxy,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 7 (July 1890): 43. The incident is discussed by Dawson, “The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain,” 179. 84  W. T. Stead, ed., “A Key to the Realm of All Knowledge. Wanted–A College of Indexers,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 397. 85  W.  T. Stead, ed., “An Office of Indexers,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 33 (September 1892): 250; Stead, “A Key to the Realm of All Knowledge. Wanted–A College of Indexers.”

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Stead himself had adopted the practice through half-yearly indexes to the Pall Mall Gazette from 1884 and was by no means the first or the only one to pursue this process: The Times newspaper and various periodicals issued indexes of their own contents, and in the USA, William Frederick Poole had been producing indexes to periodicals since 1848.86 However, Stead’s ambition, realized by his lead indexer Elizabeth Hetherington and her team, went beyond both of these precursors.87 Unlike other individual periodicals, the Review of Reviews’ indexing project covered not simply its own periodical but, through it, the broader periodical press. And his intended audience went beyond that of Poole, who indexed by subject and retrospectively at several years’ distance, whereas Hetherington indexed at much greater proximity to the initial events and their representation. The indexing process was a composite one, with two stages: each monthly issue of the magazine included an index (typically two to three pages) of the articles featured in that issue: for instance, the first two entries in the first issue read Aberdeen, Lord, on Home Rule for Scotland, W. R., Absolute Political Ethics, Herbert Spencer, N. C. 57.88

As the “Absolute Political Ethics” entry indicates, the index partially offers a means of accessing the Review of Reviews from the opposite end: via topic (turn to page 57) rather than under its periodical name or article title. The “Lord Aberdeen” entry shows the index also attempting to point readers to articles that have not even featured in the Review of Reviews, acting as a final safety-net to catch and acknowledge conversations that were not deemed worthy of full inclusion in the periodical, but which are still worth noting. From March 1895 this monthly index was also published separately, so that readers could gain an earlier overview of

 Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 169, 172.  For the first volume (on 1890, published 1891), the team included Snowden Ward leading on the photographic index, and Reverend D. Price. On Stead’s determined employment of a primarily female team of editorial assistants, on the same conditions as men, see Easley, “W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews.” 88  William Thomas Stead, ed., “Index to Periodicals.,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 1 (January 1890): 82. 86 87

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the array of periodicals and use it to help them decide which ones to buy that month.89 The second stage in this complex indexing process was a set of annual volumes dedicated to indexing the previous year’s periodicals.90 These were not simply a compilation of the existing monthly index entries: some were slightly rewritten, generally to give further detail. The first two volumes also included separate paragraph entries on each British and Irish periodical, rather like a modern annotated dictionary. These entries indicate the political leanings of each periodical and the kind of content it publishes, functioning as a guide for the uninitiated and offering another meta-overview as if from outside the genre.91 After disappointing sales of the first volume, for volume two Stead had to admit that he would be raising the price from two to five shillings, and targeting it solely at “librarians, journalists, and students”. However, as Brake points out, in comparison with Poole’s indexes this was still an intended audience of “writers of contemporary history” rather than “historians of the past”.92 Brake argues that this practice saw journalism “not as ephemera, but as a durable record”, and James Mussell sees it as Stead’s contention “that some content was timeless”.93 In modification of these views, I would suggest that Stead saw his index and digests not merely as a record to assist future historians, but—as we have seen—as already a first draft of history.94 The other notable aspect of Stead’s indexing was his “Index of Standard Photographs”, effectively an early attempt to create a catalogue of stock photographs by way of his customary participatory methods. The notion was first introduced as a “new feature” in August 1890, when Stead saw it 89  W. T. Stead, ed., “Announcements. The Monthly Index,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, 107. 90  These took varying titles: the first volume was entitled “The Annual Index of Review of Reviews,” while the second was called variously “Index to the Periodicals of the World” (on its front cover) and (on its title page) “Index to the Periodical Literature of the World,” even though Stead had in fact been obliged to leave out international periodicals after the first year. 91  In this sense it pre-empts works such as Laurel Brake, Marysa Demoor, and Margaret Beetham, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent; Academia Press; London: British Library, 2009). 92  W. T. Stead, “Preface,” Index to the Periodical Literature of the World 2 (1892): 6; Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 173. 93  Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 171; James Mussell, “‘Of the Making of Magazines There Is No End’: W.T. Stead, Newness, and the Archival Imagination,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 41, no. 1 (2015): 85, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2015.0002. 94  Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 171.

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as the photographic equivalent of the monthly “descriptive catalogue of New Books and Blue Books” and invited photographic publishers to send in details of their stock.95 This and his projected annual index were intended to deal with his conviction that “photographic publishing was at present a chaos”.96 In this venture, he dropped the façade of editorial omnipresence and omnipotence, crediting the idea to Snowden Ward (editor of the Practical Photographer) and acknowledging Ward’s “immense labour of compiling this important catalogue”.97 As with his metaphor of the “mighty maze” elucidated by the Review of Reviews, Stead suggests that the photographic index “will unlock as with a magic key an immense mine of instructive matters that is at present utterly unclassified, practically unknown”, using mythical imagery to heighten the stakes of his endeavor.98 In practice, however, since as mentioned above he found that the Annual Index did not sell as widely as he had hoped, only the very first annual ended up containing a photographic dimension.99 Stead nonetheless did not give up his ambition to produce photographic compilations. February 1895 saw him launch what the initial advertisement called “A Photographic Panorama of the World”.100 Despite the claim, this was really a compilation: elsewhere in the same issue it was called “the Photographic Art Album”. This slippage indicates the extent to which the term “panorama” had become detached from its 360° moorings across the century, and here evoked instead the image sequence of the moving panorama. The key point remained that this “album” allowed a viewer to see a range of the “finest” world landmarks.101 Here—like everything in the Review of Reviews—they had been pre-selected to offer “over 400” carefully chosen highlights rather than an unmanageably infinite array.

95  W. T. Stead, ed., “The Photographs of the Month,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 8 (August 1890): 189. 96  W. T. Stead, ed., “The Photographs of the Month. An Index to Standard Photographs Notice to the Trade,” Review of Reviews 1, no. 9 (September 1890): 293. 97  Stead, 293. 98  Stead, 293. 99  Brake, “Revolutions in Journalism,” 173. 100  “A Photographic Panorama of the World,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, 208. 101  “Specimen Page of the Photographic Art Album,” Review of Reviews, February 1895, plate facing 200.

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Fig. 6.2  “Composite Photograph of the Cabinet”, The Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): plate facing 316. Photograph author’s own, from own copy

Stead also found other ways to incorporate photographic compilation into his magazine. Following the 1892 General Election, he commissioned a “Composite Photograph of the Cabinet”, which he displayed as a full-page frontispiece to the October issue (see Fig.  6.2).102 The 102  W. T. Stead, ed., “The Composite Photograph of the Cabinet,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 34 (October 1892): 316–17. In the November 1892 issue he also published the four intermediate composite images (each of four cabinet members, then combined with Gladstone’s) from which the final image had been produced.

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techniques of composite portraiture had been pioneered in relation to convicted prisoners; Francis Galton produced some in an attempt to identify a common criminal type.103 In this very different case, and radically for its lack of deference to these eminent men’s individuality, Stead aimed to provide a compiled—and therefore perhaps distilled—single image of the “seventeen persons” comprising the new Government. The task of harmonizing seventeen portraits was facilitated by their all being white men, and the resulting impression was, in Stead’s words, of a “benevolent and thoughtful gentleman of about sixty”. This particular experiment in compilation was not especially successful. The following month, he acknowledged that the result “had been subjected to much criticism” and seen rather as having the features “of a benevolent imbecile”.104 Stead thus managed to wryly mock both the techniques of composite photography and the abilities of the new cabinet. While he recognized the potentially reductive and distorting downsides of compilation, he was also committed to trying out every variant of it that he could.

Conclusions The Review of Reviews explicitly saw itself as contributing to a very first draft of contemporary history. It was the product of a process of sifting the “grain” from the “chaff” that Stead saw as essential to the larger process of contemporary history writing. This periodical digest project certainly relied on big data, but Stead used that material very differently from such projects in the twenty-first century. Rather than using the aggregated units to ask summary questions, Review of Reviews—produced serially to keep its readers up-to-date with the previous month’s events and debates— placed its faith in units themselves and their composite selection, arrangement and distillation. The Review of Reviews also explicitly set out to serve as a compilation that would provide an overview. It aimed to give its readers a condensed 103  See Gavan Tredoux, “Francis Galton and Composite Portraiture,” accessed May 4, 2021, https://galton.org/composite.htm; Christopher Morton, “Collecting Portraits, Exhibiting Race: Augustus Pitt-Rivers’s Cartes de Visite at the South Kensington Museum,” in Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 111–12. 104  W. T. Stead, ed., “The Composite Photograph of the Cabinet,” Review of Reviews 6, no. 35 (November 1892): 427.

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and digested survey on the entire field of periodical literature, on the whole world (though the subsequent establishment of American and Australian editions acknowledged that each would have a different focus and perspectival center) and cumulatively on the contemporary era. It did so through a particular remediation process, in which prior periodical material remained in the same medium (print) but was excerpted and recontextualized into a new format and frame. While “scissors-and-paste journalism” and book review excerpts also remediated in similar ways, Stead’s approach stood out. Unlike these other formats, the Review of Reviews set each unit within a mosaic that declared the unit’s relative meaning and significance—both for immediate readers and for posterity— in the context of “All Knowledge”.

CHAPTER 7

Ephemeral Collective Biography in Men of the Time (1852–99)

Compiled or “collective” biographies proliferated in the nineteenth century. These works ranged from group biographies, which clustered together several chapter-length lives on a common theme, to biographical dictionaries, which provided a large number of brief biographical entries in alphabetical order for reference. While the former strand has received valuable attention from Alison Booth, the latter are more off-putting for close analysis because of their formulaic, curt and determinedly non-­ literary style.1However, they are of interest to this study because they often represented recent lives and were ambitious in their attempts to provide overview on the contemporary era. This chapter and the next focus on this question: How did Victorian collective biographies attempt to offer an overview, especially when they included contemporary or recent lives? As Juliette Atkinson has identified, most Victorian biographies were about Victorian people, so it is not a

1  On group biographies, see Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). A brief overview of both types is given in Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), chapter 5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_7

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niche question but a central one.2 My discussion concentrates on an explicitly ephemeral biographical dictionary, Men of the Time (1852–99), which exclusively represented living people. It had to deal with the challenges of presenting ongoing lives as known, and it complicated matters by superseding itself every three years with a new edition. Chapter 8 then turns to the very different, would-be definitive Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901; hereafter DNB), which exclusively represented dead people but which was nonetheless full of very recent subjects. The DNB is much better known than this chapter’s case study of Men of the Time, but in order to understand how and why the DNB embraced recent lives, we need to see it not as a solitary or unique phenomenon, but within the collective biographical culture of the time. These chapters investigate the kinds of overview that these compilations offer in representing their contemporary era. Their titles are grand and sweeping, evoking a panoramic unity. Can their content possibly live up to those claims, however, given their unnerving proximity to their subjects? Booth suggests that collective biography is inherently close-up and specific, recounting how “biographical or ‘particular’ history […] has been a recognized counterpart to ‘universal’ or political history since Plutarch”.3 However, as this book has so far shown, with the waning of faith in panoramic perspective through the middle of the nineteenth century, more attention turned to compilation formats to offer different kinds of overview. These chapters argue that by the late nineteenth century, one way to seek “universal history” was through a compilation of particulars. Prominent in the period was what Susan Stewart has since described as the impossible “longing” to collect and contain.4 In what ways do these collective biographies represent their compendia of lives as a synecdoche—let alone a complete picture—of “the Time”? Men of the Time (and in different ways the DNB) oscillates between promises to be up-to-date and to be definitive. This can usefully be 2  Alison Booth, “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 41; Booth, How to Make It as a Woman; Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century “Hidden” Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31. 3  Alison Booth, “The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 341. 4  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

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understood as a tension between the two forms of collective memory discussed in Chap. 1, communicative and cultural memory.5 Since communicative memory is typically recent and informal, and cultural memory is typically more distant, and the product of deliberate memorialization, we might expect to map our two case studies onto these two types. We might see Men of the Time as a product of and contribution to communicative memory—explicitly contemporary, admittedly ephemeral, repeatedly revised—and the DNB as a product of cultural memory: grandiose, costly and intendedly one-off. However, this divide does not stand up in practice. We see how distinctive Men of the Time and DNB both were when we situate the categories of communicative/cultural memory in the context of late-Victorian expectations about history writing. With the establishment of history as an academic discipline in the mid-Victorian period, historians seeking professional credibility found this best served by medieval and early modern studies, while those who wrote longer-range histories of England typically halted their narratives at fifty or even hundred years’ distance from their present.6 Writing about contemporary history, where any conclusions might easily be undermined within a generation, would risk a short shelf-life for their books: not the way to make one’s mark and secure a long-standing reputation. Historians’ avoidance of contemporary history can be illuminated by Vansina’s concept (also outlined in Chap. 1) of a “floating gap” between the temporal periods that are covered by communicative and cultural memory.7 Professionalizing Victorian historians perceived a long “floating gap” between what counted as the recent past and what counted as history proper. These historians saw themselves as contributing to a scientific discipline rather than to a national myth (though recent scholars argue they

5  Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”; Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” 6  See Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, chapters 2, 5–6. Such historians include mid-Victorians William Stubbs, J.  R. Green, Mandell Creighton, and Edward Freeman and James Anthony Froude (who disagreed on almost every aspect of historiography except their choice of early-modern subject matter); later, T. F. Tout and A. F. Pollard. 7  Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 23–24.

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did both), but they certainly hoped for their books to become definitive accounts and thus part of cultural memory.8 By contrast, the collective biographies that I examine here fail to respect any distinction between both communicative and cultural memory and thereby challenge the conceptual divide between the two. Men of the Time alternated between the two forms of collective memory in its self-­ presentation. Its editors strove to be up-to-date, but they knew that even that hard-won achievement would almost immediately be invalidated. DNB did not include living people, but many of its subjects were only recently deceased. It was a would-be definitive work that nonetheless embraced many individuals within living memory. It was therefore a would-be piece of cultural memory that was also a product and representation of communicative memory. In their practice, both projects did away with that “floating gap” altogether, instead grappling with the contested space of what I would call a “floating overlap”. This commonality is surprising because in their setup, content and aims, the two projects were notably different. Men of the Time was a somewhat peripatetic brand that passed between three publishers in its fifty-year lifespan and had at least eight editors over that time, along with unknown numbers of contributors. The DNB was a much more intentional outfit, as I detail in Chap. 8: it was funded by the publisher George Smith, produced under the successive (briefly joint) editorship of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee and with carefully commissioned and recorded (if sometimes occluded) contributors. The two were equally different in their chosen content. Men of the Time explicitly addressed the contemporary era and solely included living subjects, whereas the DNB explicitly excluded them. The former aimed to be up-to-date and represent the present, whereas the latter aimed to be long-lasting and represent the long sweep of British history, up to a recent past that was notably proximate but nonetheless endstopped by death. Both projects nonetheless share structural features. Both dealt with their lack of hindsight on recent lives by becoming multiple in their structures. Rather than claiming to assert a singular narrative overview on 8  Stephen J. Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Leslie Howsam, “What the Victorian Empire Learned: A Perspective on History, Reading and Print in Nineteenth-Century Textbooks,” Journal of Victorian Culture 25, no. 1 (January 31, 2020): 47–62.

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recent history, both claimed the freedom to incorporate miniature narratives within an overall alphabetical form. Both also included the work of many authors, presented nominally as homogeneous. In reflecting upon how collections become meaningful to their owners or readers, Stewart suggests that “it is necessary to obliterate the object’s context of origin”.9 Putting such a procedure into action, authorship in the DNB was reduced to discreet initials (checkable against a list of authors) and in Men of the Time to complete anonymity. As a result, the two works were more similar than we might think, showing the DNB to be far from a unique monolithic project. At the same time, examining both of these works casts the distinctive features and approach of each into relief. Stewart’s reading of how collections reveal a “longing” to “approach closed knowledge” “about the world” can also be extrapolated to collective biographies.10 These were, as Simon Morgan puts it of another nineteenth-­century compilation format, the autograph album, attempts “(always in vain) to categorize, fix, and contain the bewildering variety of individuals who both inhabited and comprised the Victorian public sphere”.11 Such compilations were all efforts at plenitude that inevitably failed in that ambition. We should therefore perhaps resist being too sharp with our judgments about their inclusion or representational practices: their boldness in engaging with contemporary history was always a corollary of their imperfection.

What Was Men of the Time? Men of the Time was first produced in 1852 under anonymous authorship and editorship, with parallel editions published in London (by David Bogue) and New York (by J. S. Redfield). That 1852 American edition’s preface features an endorsement from President Millard Fillmore, who praises it as “precisely that kind of information that every public and intelligent man desires to see, especially in reference to the distinguished men of Europe, but which I have found it extremely difficult to obtain”.12 As his comment indicates, the work was cosmopolitan in a way that the DNB  Stewart, On Longing, 158.  Stewart, 161. 11   Simon Morgan, “Celebrity: Academic ‘Pseudo-Event’ or a Useful Concept for Historians?,” Cultural and Social History 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 107, https://doi.org/1 0.2752/147800411X12858412044474. 12  Men of the Time (1852), 5. 9

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later was not: George Smith initially aspired to a universal biographical dictionary, but was talked down by Leslie Stephen.13 Men of the Time was geographically expansive although chronologically confined to the present, whereas the DNB (in contrast to its nominally unlimited backward timeframe) had national—though capacious—boundaries. Neither decision could prevent criticism: Men of the Time’s apparent weighting toward foreign lives met with rancor from some sections of the British press, which criticized the work’s foregrounding of “foreign potentates, soldiers, and politicians”.14 A brief survey of the Men of the Time’s editors shows how widespread collective biography was at this time. Two of its editors made their careers from the genre. Edward Walford (1832–1897), editor of the 1862 and 1865 editions, compiled Hardwicke’s Shilling annuals on the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, House of Commons, and Titles of Courtesy, as well as a short-lived Register and Magazine of Biography (1869), which he worked on with Men of the Time’s subsequent editor Thompson Cooper (1837–1904). The Register focused specifically on contemporaries and aimed to consolidate otherwise scattered information about births, marriages and deaths, but due to lack of interest it only lasted six months. Cooper himself, who served as Men of the Time editor from 1872 to 1884, simultaneously wrote a book series Men of Mark: A Gallery of Contemporary Portraits (1876–83), which paired biographical entries with photographic portraits. What is more, Cooper did not confine himself to living contemporaries. His A New Biographical Dictionary (1873) exclusively represented deceased subjects, leading his preface to lament ghoulishly that during the printing process, “Napoleon III., Lord Lytton, and several other persons of note have died, who could not, while living, be included in a work which does not profess to deal with contemporary biography”.15 He then became the most prolific of all contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography, producing 1430 entries in total.16 This career ­suggests

13  H. C. G. Matthew, “Leslie Stephen and the New DNB,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1995, http://global.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/freeodnb/shelves/lslecture1/. 14  “The Men of the Time in 1852,” The Examiner, February 7, 1852. 15  Thompson Cooper, A New Biographical Dictionary: Containing Concise Notices of Eminent Persons of All Ages and Countries: And More Particularly of Distinguished Natives of Great Britain and Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1874), Preface [unpaginated]. 16  This total comprises 1422 entries by the time Sidney Lee wrote the “Statistical Account” of the Dictionary in 1900, plus eight further entries for the 1901 Missing Persons volumes.

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that Cooper was willing to write biography on subjects both living and dead but saw them as strictly separate enterprises. The Men of the Time volumes were compilations rather than panoramas of their contemporary moment: they offered not a single unbroken overview but a mosaic of tiny pieces. We can see this difference clearly by comparison with earlier and Romanticist collective biographical projects that sought in a more organic if selective way to capture the “Spirit of the Age”. The volumes of this name by William Hazlitt (1825) and R. H. Horne (1844) showed their authors to be ambivalent about the direction of agency, unclear about whether the zeitgeist shapes these figures, speaks through them or is generated by them.17 Hazlitt and Horne, however, were decisive in their evaluation of these figures: for example, Hazlitt’s volume attacked Walter Scott, while Horne’s lamented the rise of Edward Pusey’s Oxford Movement. Alison Booth argues that, unlike these earlier Romantic-inspired collections, Men of the Time “avoided controversy by eschewing detail or criticism”.18 This chapter tests out and challenges that interpretation and asks: Since a collection that entirely avoids those things becomes merely a list (as was Who’s Who at the time), what balance could be struck between the two?19 I argue that Men of the Time endeavored to compromise between a desire for regularity among its units, and acknowledgment of its subjects’ particulars, but that it only partly succeeded. First, I examine the work’s selection processes and choices, then the relationship between contributor and subject and the impacts of these. Rather than consistently “eschewing detail or criticism”, the entries on writers George Eliot and Wilkie Collins show that Men of the Time was uneven in its selection processes and tendency to critique or puff and was problematically error-strewn. Thereafter, I turn to look (as Booth does not) at the successive editions of the work, and the ways that editors chose to update it and supersede previous versions. Here, I argue that the editors were highly conscious of their subjects’ mortality and creative in their response to this issue. Different editions also reveal how subjects’ reputations and reasons for inclusion changed over time—as we see in the entries on Thomas Carlyle and Queen Victoria—and editors struggled (like many of Victoria’s biographers) to  See Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 59–62.  Booth, “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” 48. 19  “History of Who’s Who,” Who’s Who & Who Was Who, accessed August 11, 2020, https://www.ukwhoswho.com/page/946. 17 18

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effectively cohere her private and political life. Finally, my discussion addresses how the work was received by reviewers and readers. One reader’s interactive engagement with and revision of it suggests that users valued this biographical dictionary but did not view it with reverence, instead recognizing that what it offered was far from a definitive overview.

Whom to Select? Men of the Time’s Preface from 1862 onward declared its aim as follows: This work was originally undertaken to fill a place till then unoccupied by any of the multifarious books of reference which the industry and enterprise of the age have provided for almost every class of the community. We have records of the aristocracy of birth, and wealth, in the form of Peerages […] Civil Service […] Post-Office Directories […] lists of Military and Naval Officers […] but the aristocracy of intellect had been left, until this book first appeared, without any special record.20

What was an “aristocracy of intellect” and who did it comprise? The phrase itself was a slight adjustment from the previous version, whose anonymous editor had referred to “the aristocracy of genius”. Perhaps the new editor Edward Walford felt the need to tone down the claim he made for his selection—but neither proved a particularly straightforward category to define. One way that the series selected its individuals was on the basis of sex. In the original 1852 edition, the title Men of the Time was a fairly literal one, and its only female entry was for Queen Victoria, who as always held an anomalous position. Booth has shown how this 1852 edition elided wives with their husbands, with the domestic writing partnerships of the Halls and Howitts elided into entries for the husbands.21 This obliviousness to female achievement met with criticism from a reviewer in the Athenaeum, who commented on the lack of “trace therein of one of the characteristics of the age—the position won for themselves, against all disadvantage, by ‘The Women of the Time’”.22 Such comments remind us 20  Thompson Cooper, Men of the Time; a Dictionary of Contemporaries, 8th edition (London, New  York: G.  Routledge and sons, 1872), iii, http://archive.org/details/ mentimeadiction03coopgoog. 21  Booth, “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” 46. 22  “The Men of the Time in 1852,” The Athenaeum, February 7, 1852, 168.

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not to read the volume’s exclusions too readily as reflections of any kind of intellectual consensus. The series’ approach to female subjects changed in 1856 under the editorship of Alaric Alexander Watts, when a subtitle was appended: Also Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Women of the Time. In that edition, women were added in a supplementary section at the back of the book, rather than being integrated with their male counterparts.23 The 1865 edition amended the title to a rather paradoxical statement: Men of the Time: A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Living Characters of Both Sexes. There was evidently such a strong attachment to the key phrase “Men of the Time” that publishers preferred contradictory titles to losing that brand name. 1872 saw the addition of the subtitle A Dictionary of Contemporaries, putting the emphasis on synchronicity within the volume and implicitly with the reader him/herself.24 Finally, from 1891 the volume became Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries. At last, it had achieved a title reflective of its content, just in time for it to peter out after a final—fifteenth—edition in 1899. One of the most contentious tasks of any collective biography or hall of fame is its selection, and this is perhaps particularly the case when the selection pool are still alive and can argue back. Many pantheons, including the National Portrait Gallery (founded 1856), excluded anyone who had died less than a minimum number of years previously.25 The smaller the pantheon the more fraught the task: halls of fame that claim to select the singular greatest X or Y from his/her era are bound to cause dispute. As discussed in Chap. 8, this pressure is somewhat dissipated by increasing the number selected, effectively lowering the stakes and introducing a principle of multiplicity. However, inclusive projects that welcomed multitudes could quickly precipitate criticism for absences. Reviews of Men of the Time were contemptuously dismissive on this score. The Examiner is particularly scathing: “It talks for a page about ROBERT OWEN, and  See Booth, “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” 46–47.  For further discussion of the Victorian development of what it meant to be “a contemporary”, see Trev Broughton, “Victoria’s Victorians, or How Contemporariness Strikes,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24, no. 4 (December 6, 2019): 419–25, https://doi. org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz046. 25   Uta Kornmeier, “Madame Tussaud’s as a Popular Pantheon,” in Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea, ed. Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004), 150. 23 24

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says not a word of RICHARD OWEN; […] it commemorates THOMAS MILLER the basket-maker and has no mention of JAMES MILL the logician”.26 These reviews condemn what they see as a lack of coherence and thus of overview. The series was slow to accommodate emerging figures. In 1852, when “not a word” was said of Richard Owen, he was already Hunterian Professor and Conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons and had received the Royal Medal in controversial circumstances; he was added into the following edition.27 James Mill had died in 1836, but his son John Stuart Mill (who perhaps the Examiner reviewer had meant) was eventually added in 1859.28 John Ruskin was not included until 1856, although even at the time of the 1852 edition he had already published several notable works.29 When he did appear, under Watts’ editorship, his contributor made up for the previous omission by being exceptionally effusive, introducing Ruskin as “undeniably the most gifted Author who has ever devoted himself to the exposition of Art”.30 Marian Evans (George Eliot) was not included until 1875, and though her early work was mostly published anonymously, she had become well known by her pseudonym when she segued into novel writing in the 1850s. Equally controversial could be entries’ contents. Some were notably error-strewn, and George Eliot’s is a prime example. When she was finally added in 1875—perhaps on the strength of Middlemarch (1871–2)—she is described slightly sheepishly as “EVANS, MARIAN, a popular English novelist, well known under the pseudonym of George Eliot”.31 The entry erroneously describes her as “the daughter of a poor clergyman, but [who] in early life was adopted by a wealthy clergyman who gave her a first-class education”. Since her father was a land agent and the man who best fits that benefactor description was his employer Francis Newdigate—neither  “The Men of the Time in 1852,” February 7, 1852.  Alaric Alexander Watts, Men of the Time; or, Sketches of Living Notables (London: David Bogue, 1856), 606, http://archive.org/details/mentimeorsketch03mengoog. 28  Men of the Time: Biographical Sketches of Eminent Living Characters. Also, Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Women of the Time (London: W.  Kent & Co., 1859), 552, http:// archive.org/details/mentime01unkngoog. 29  These included the first two volumes of his monumental Modern Painters (1843–60), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and volume 1 of The Stones of Venice (1851–53). 30  Watts, Men of the Time (1856), 680. 31  Thompson Cooper, ed., Men of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries, Containing Biographical Notices of Eminent Characters of Both Sexes (London, New York: G. Routledge and sons, 1875), 383, http://archive.org/details/mentimeadiction00unkngoog. 26 27

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of them clergymen—this suggests that the contributor has hurriedly transposed from Eliot’s own Scenes of Clerical Life (1856–57), assuming it to be autobiographical. These fallacious details were conjured as if a combination of romantic lowly origins and “first-class education” was the only plausible way for a woman to become an erudite writer. The entry also exaggerates the importance of Herbert Spencer: it elides him with Charles Bray and claims he was her “tutor” “when she left school”. Overall, this entry drastically over-enlarges the role of various famous (and fallacious) men, though it makes no mention at all of Eliot’s partner, G. H. Lewes. Since this partnership was well known in London circles (and was of nearly two decades’ standing by this point), it seems the entry was seeking to protect her reputation by its omission. Whatever the reasons, the contributor seems to have gleaned their information from distant and unreliable sources. Was it preferable for editors to risk errors through ignorance or to consult with the subject themselves and risk obsequiousness? That other famous biographical dictionary of living contemporaries, Who’s Who (1849–), since 1897 has routinely had the subject generate their own entry through completing a questionnaire, enabling those subjects to include or omit details at will (resulting in entries that read like CVs). Men of the Time seems to have deployed this practice occasionally but inconsistently. The 1856 edition contained the earliest published biography of Wilkie Collins, but as a result mis-dated his birth. This and the expanded 1859 edition also included some rather acid judgments on his works, attributing The Frozen Deep to Dickens’ sole rather than joint authorship and commenting that his recent publications did “not support the reputation which attended” his previous work. It concluded that Collins could financially “afford, if it so likes him, to make hazardous experiments on the public taste”.32 For the 1862 edition, the new editor Edward Walford wrote to Collins to ask him to correct his own entry, and Collins replied in caustic vein: “I regret that it is quite impossible for me to correct a production which is so essentially incorrigible as the biographical notice that accompanies your letter. I will mention the main errors, as a matter of personal courtesy towards yourself—and will leave it to you to decide

 Men of the Time (1859), 166–67.

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whether the Memoir ought in common justice to be rewritten or not”.33 Unsurprisingly, the resultant 1862 entry removed those previous acerbic criticisms, and recast his recent work as “popular”, “agreeable” and “successful”.34 Such consultation had risks of its own. Several reviewers suggested that the Men of the Time entries had been written by their subjects. The Leader of 1857 thought it could recognize one subject (the poet Sydney Dobell) as “the author of his own glorification”, as his entry waxed lyrical about having passed “the sweetest and most impressible period of his life in one of the loveliest of our English valleys”.35 By the 1880s, the Saturday Review thought there could be no doubt that many of the “biographies are, in fact, autobiographies”.36 This practice was used as an occasion for humorous spoofs by the light magazines: in response to the 1895 edition of Men of the Time, Judy published a short piece suggesting “the following additions”, the first of which opens: “JUMPER, SNORTER Q.—One of the most remarkable men of the time. Distinguished himself in literature by writing paragraphs in a society paper”.37 These spoofs partly mock other reviewers’ concern with omissions, but most emphatically send up Men of the Time’s tendency to puff its subjects’ reputations. Overall, reviews repeatedly castigate the various editors for giving the compilation insufficient coherence.

How to Be Superseded Any chance of coherence had to be re-negotiated every three years as the new edition implicitly superseded the previous one. How did Men of the Time negotiate its ephemerality? One answer is that it was highly conscious of its subjects’ mortality. Edward Walford’s 1862 preface made explicit comment: “Even while these sheets have been passing through the 33  Wilkie Collins to Edward Walford, 17 April 1861. Wilkie Collins, The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters, ed. William Baker et al., vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 230. 34   Edward Walford, ed., Men of the Time: Biographical Sketches of Eminent Living Characters, Including Women (London: W.  Kent & Co., 1862), 176, https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89097340830&view=1up&seq=5. 35  Watts, Men of the Time (1856), 225. 36  “Men of the Time in 1857,” Leader and Saturday Analyst, November 21, 1857, 1122; “Men of the Time,” Saturday Review, February 23, 1884, 257. 37  “Men of the Time.,” Judy: Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, May 29, 1895.

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press, the hand of Death has been at work”, whose victims include “our lamented Prince Consort”.38 It is impossible for any publication to remain perfectly up-to-date through the process of typesetting and printing, though it seems to have been a particular problem for Walford: his edition also includes a supplement at the back of those men and women whose entries arrived too late for alphabetical insertion.39 Then, from 1868, under editor G.  H. Townsend, a “necrology” was added to encourage people to utilize previous editions.40 It provided a list of previous subjects who had since died, with birth date, death date and the editions they were featured in. This necrology tried to leverage the series’ rapidly outdated nature as an asset, by directing the reader to cross-reference with a previous edition that might otherwise have been seen as worthless. The supersession of each version by the next was certainly more of a weakness than a strength. Although the necrology offered a chance to claim earlier editions’ continued value, their prefaces stressed more fervently and routinely the standalone qualities of their new edition. Direct comparison between editions, however, foregrounds just how fallacious were these claims. The eighth, ninth and tenth editions (1872, 1875 and 1879), for example, have almost identical prefaces. The only element that changes is the measurement of distance from the previous edition: the eighth edition declares “four years have elapsed since the appearance of the Seventh Edition, and during that period no fewer than 424 individuals who were noticed in its columns, have been removed by death”.41 The ninth and tenth editions state the same thing, except that they change “4 years” to “3” and “3 ½”, respectively, and 424 deaths to 293 and 342. Given this repetition of the same phrases and contents, the claim of each edition that “The present edition of MEN OF THE TIME is to all intents and purposes a new book” seems rather overstated.42 The fact that the editors were reluctant to make more changes than necessary means that individuals were typically included in repeat editions throughout their lifetime. This practice enables us to examine how entries changed over time. First, we examine Thomas Carlyle, who had a notably long entry in the first edition and who—because he lived a long time and  Walford, Men of the Time (1862).  Walford, 813–42. 40  This first appeared in the seventh edition (1868) under the heading “Biographical index” and gained the “necrology” title from the eighth edition (1872). 41  Cooper, Men of the Time (1872), iii–iv. 42  Cooper, iii. 38 39

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was present in so many editions but with a gradually diminishing reputation—allows us to see how such a shift was reflected in print. Then we turn to Queen Victoria, whose entry offered the greatest opportunity for this biographical dictionary to attempt overview, but also tested the limits of that capacity. As a result, her entry served different functions at different points through the period. When the series began in 1852, Carlyle was at the height of his reputation and he received a substantial entry. That high reputation did not prevent the seemingly inevitable errors (the New York edition manages to get both his birthdate and birthplace wrong, describing him as born “in 1796, at Middlebie”, a year too late and outside his actual birthplace village of Ecclefechan), but does perhaps explain the attention that was given to amending those errors in later editions.43 Successive editions also show us differences in how Carlyle was introduced. The 1852 New York edition described him as “a British author and reviewer”; the 1853 London edition introduces him as “the ‘Censor of the Age’”; the next edition in 1856 revises this to “the great ‘Censor of the Age,’ as his adulators are wont to entitle him, and, in truth, one of the most original thinkers of his time”.44 By 1859, the “Censor” label has gone; the “original thinker” accolade was removed for the 1862 edition, and he was left rather denuded as simply “essayist, biographer, and historian”.45 Similarly, Carlyle’s early entries were bulked out by an extended quotation from a letter he had written to Goethe from his early married life in Dumfriesshire, but this quotation was eventually removed in 1862. This rather quieter mode and condensed length perhaps gives an indication of Carlyle’s diminished prowess by that later period, as his earlier Tory radicalism turned into bitter tirades. More generally, as editions mounted up, the changes and additions became more minor. For Carlyle’s entry, the only differences between eighth and tenth editions (1872 and 1879) are some additional sentences about further appointments and honors. There is a sense of the bildungsroman in some of these lives: an initial period of formative experience and coming-­ of-­ age, followed by an equilibrium about which there is apparently less to say. Queen Victoria’s entry was the site of even greater and more continued revisions. Her contemporary biographers always faced a challenge of  Men of the Time (1852), 116.  Watts, Men of the Time (1856), 131. 45  Men of the Time (1859), 131. 43 44

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finding the most suitable depiction of her as a sovereign while preserving her self-projected image as a respectable wife and mother.46 In the first edition of Men of the Time, she was the only woman featured. By virtue of her anomalous status, the editor seems to have been unsure where best to place her. The 1852 American edition lists her under V; the 1853 London edition alphabetizes her under E for “England, Victoria, Queen of”. Her position became debatable again when (from 1856) other “Celebrated Women” were added in an appendix. Whether for ease of typesetting or nervousness about downgrading the Queen to an appendix, Watts left Queen Victoria among the men rather than with the other women. The next edition in 1859, however, took the opposite approach and moved her to the all-female appendix. This endless prevaricating is a sign of how uncertain editors were about her reason for inclusion. Was Queen Victoria to be celebrated for her position or individual distinctions? In contrast to her eventual mammoth DNB entry of 1901, these early editions of Men of the Time kept her entry short—her 1850s entries were shorter than Carlyle’s—and confined themselves primarily to her life as an individual rather than her position as head of state. The 1856 edition adds the statement: “Happily, the political constitution under which we live, and the high discretion which has marked Her Majesty’s government, render unnecessary in this notice such an analysis of personal government as those which are given in this volume in the biographies of some other living sovereigns”.47 Her achievement was her restraint. The later entries, written after Albert’s death and Victoria’s retreat into widowhood, have greater challenges to negotiate. In the 1870s, the first half of her entry remains primarily private and domestic, though also official: record of her marriage is immediately followed by its “issue”, in numbered chronological order, listing not only her children’s births but also their marriages, and taking up a full half-column of this three-column biography. From 1862, the end of this list obsequiously comments: “Her Majesty is the pattern of a woman in all the relations of life, as a queen, as a daughter, as a wife, and as a mother”.48 By contrast, the second half of the entry moves away from the specifics of Victoria’s own life story. This is 46  Helen Kingstone, “Representing the 1819 Cohort in the Dictionary of National Biography,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24, no. 4 (December 6, 2019): 460–68, https:// doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz048. 47  Watts, Men of the Time (1856), 260. 48  Cooper, Men of the Time (1875), 977.

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perhaps a way of dealing with the challenge of how to narrate her extreme seclusion from public duties after Albert’s death in 1861. First, we encounter a section that seems to set the tone for Sidney Lee’s DNB entry on her. As I have written about elsewhere, her DNB entry exhibits a disproportionate concentration of the term “sympathy” and uses it to indicate a reciprocal relationship with her subjects.49 Similarly, in this entry Victoria has both “steadfastly manifested” an “anxious interest” in “the social welfare of her people” and “throughout the civilized world, her name is never mentioned save in terms of sympathy, admiration, affection, and respect, as a Christian woman and as a queen”. Victoria is both the giver and receiver of sympathy. Immediately after this section, however, the entry switches to a brisk list of “the political events of Her Majesty’s reign”, over which she had minimal agency.50 This structure effectively uses Victoria’s life as scaffolding in which to discuss other events and concerns, as in another would-be biography, Charlotte Yonge’s The Victorian Half-Century: A Jubilee Book (1887).51 The 1872 entry, for example, ends in a terse style, focusing on the same changes in governmental administration that would close J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People two years later: The Conservatives being placed in a minority at the general election of 1868, Mr. Disraeli resigned office and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Mr. Gladstone, who has continued in office to the present time. The chief events of Mr. Gladstone’s administration have been the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the passing of the Irish Land Act and the Elementary Education Bill, and the abolition of purchase in the army.52

By the next edition three years later, some of this syntax was adjusted: “have been” became “were”, and two more “chief events” were added: “the negotiation of the Treaty of Washington respecting the Alabama Claims, and the Passing of the Ballot Act”. More significantly, a further sentence was appended: “At the general election of Feb., 1874, the Conservatives again came into power, and a new administration was 49   Kingstone, “Representing the 1819 Cohort in the Dictionary of National Biography,” 466. 50  Cooper, Men of the Time (1875), 977. 51  Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 125–30. 52  Cooper, Men of the Time (1872), 939–40. On Yonge and Green, respectively, see Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, 125–30; 105–6.

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formed by Mr. Disraeli who has continued in office to the present time”.53 Gladstone’s victory goes from being the terminal point of the narrative to being just one incident along the way. These are the results of a book that wants to be up-to-date—and which sees the Queen’s life as the best avenue through which to demonstrate that. Men of the Time uses her life as a way to knit individual scraps of a life into an overview of contemporary history. However, the book’s ability to do so is notably hampered. Tucked away among the Vs, the Queen’s entry is not central in any narrative or visual structure. The entry fails even to join Victoria’s own life to her era’s political events, let alone those of the rest of the “Men of the Time”. Thirdly, even the account of “the political events” is little more sophisticated than a chronological list. The entry does not achieve the status of overview.

Reception and Usage The shelf-life of Men of the Time can only partially be understood by examining its contents. We also need to consider how it was received and used. The largest number of reviews came in response to the original 1852 edition. Several of them condemn it as a failure, but suggest that it was an impossible project. The Athenaeum calls for a larger volume, “three or four times the size”, while the Examiner also criticizes “its too scanty space” and declares that “such a book on such a scale would be an absurdity at the best. The scheme was an impracticable one”.54 Reviews of the later editions often comment on their “marked improvements”, but several still judge them “a mass of confused misinformation”.55 They are at best encouraging, never actively enthusiastic. What is therefore striking about this somewhat unsuccessful project is its relative commercial success. The sheer fact of its fifteen editions, across almost fifty years, indicates that it sold despite never being critically well received. Some readers dealt with this work’s perpetual ephemerality in surprising and creative ways. As Simon Morgan mentions, it was not unusual for people pasted paper cuttings from Men of the Time and other biographical dictionaries into autograph albums to create their own “personal  Cooper, Men of the Time (1875), 978.  “The Men of the Time in 1852,” February 7, 1852; “The Men of the Time in 1852,” February 7, 1852. 55  “Men of the Time,” The Critic, March 1, 1856; “Men of the Time in 1857,” 1122. 53 54

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pantheon”.56 Others prioritized the volume itself: rather than merely buying the new edition to replace their previous one, they could extend the functional lifespan of their existing copy. In one surviving copy of the 1852 edition, the owner—New York editor, publisher and biographer Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816–1878)—has made written additions and interleaved cuttings.57 The pasted-in documents include both expansions and updates. Duyckinck was clearly prepared to criticize the editorial selection: he gave his own list of “omissions”, and also pasted in a short review cutting that lists further such omissions. He followed up this impulse by pasting in cuttings that serve as additional entries, for instance for the American politician Nathaniel P. Banks who won a seat in Congress in 1852. He also added extra detail: we learn for instance that the Italian clergyman Giovanni Giacinto Achilli “visited America”. The majority of Duyckinck’s interpolations, however, are updates, and these include events that took place after a replacement volume had been issued. Opposite the entry for humorist Gilbert Abbott à Beckett (who wrote for Punch, dramatized Dickens’ short stories and wrote a 1847–48 Comic History of England), we see an interpolated sheet with his 1856 obituary, showing Duyckinck personally updating the volume over time. These additions could provide further detail and/or miss out others. Opposite Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s entry, Duyckinck pasted in a review of her novel Very Successful (1856), which eventually made it into her Men of Time entry in 1859, though of course in less detail than in the review. Neither source mentions Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s enforced 1858 stay in a lunatic asylum, after her marriage breakdown became acrimonious and her husband tried to silence her by declaring her mad.58 Men of the Time in 1859 kept silent on this matter, and then responded even more silently—and as always, belatedly—by removing her from 1862 onward. Duyckinck’s interpolations, therefore, acted as a way of bypassing the dictionary’s attempts at brevity and at proportionality between entries. The attention he gave Men of the Time suggests that he saw it as a valuable repository of knowledge. Duyckinck bought one edition and tried to keep it up-to-date through  Morgan, “Celebrity: Academic ‘Pseudo-Event’ or a Useful Concept for Historians?,” 108.  Men of the Time (1852). Copy belonging to Lenox Library New York, from Duyckinck Collection (donated in 1878) scanned in at https://archive.org/stream/menoftimeorsketc00newy (accessed 12 August 2020). 58  Marie Mulvey-Roberts, “Lytton, Rosina Anne Doyle Bulwer [Née Rosina Anne Doyle Wheeler], Lady Lytton (1802–1882), Novelist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed August 18, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17316. 56 57

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scrapbook techniques in subsequent years. However, by adding extra pages on specific individuals, he also undercut the work’s homogenized overview and instead produced a landscape of differentiated particulars. This might seem a point on which Men of the Time was treated differently from the “monumental” DNB, but this kind of accretive modification was not unique. As I will show in the next chapters, the DNB’s editorial staff were highly conscious of its status as a “living organism” rather than a monolithic monument.59 Readers were equally hands-on at times. Amber Regis has noted similar practices with one set of DNB volumes in University of Sheffield’s Western Bank Library during the mid-­ twentieth century.60 Between 1923 and 1963, corrections and additions to the DNB were published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, and somebody carefully cut and pasted these into the right pages of the Sheffield copy’s original volumes. This practice is a way of extending the work’s lifespan and shows a value for it combined with a certain lack of reverence, a recognition that the volume is not definitive. Such methodical updating is gratifying from librarians working with a determinedly monumental set of volumes. It is more surprising to discover parallel practices in relation to the 1852 Men of the Time volume. It is a useful reminder that readers and purchasers of that first edition did not necessarily expect it to be superseded in three years, and that rather than buying an additional or replacement volume, they might seek to extend its lifespan.

Conclusions We have seen that Men of the Time was rather uneven in its editorial overview, especially under its first (anonymous) editor, but arguably also throughout its lifespan. Reviewers repeatedly declared that a “dictionary of contemporaries” should serve as a directory of reliable, non-evaluative facts, but some articles were frustratingly ignorant about their subject, while others showed signs of being authored by the subjects themselves, opening the volume’s aims up to question. The Saturday Review was particularly scathing on that score. An 1884 review criticized the then editor Thompson Cooper for insufficient editing, and accused him of having 59  Sidney Lee, “The ‘DNB’: Sir Sidney Lee on the Oxford Reprint,” The Times, November 23, 1920, sec. “Letters to the Editor.” 60  Amber Regis, “The DNB Unbound” (Bishop Grosseteste University: British Association for Victorian Studies conference, 2017).

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“collected a vast mass of materials, of varying interest and value”, over which “he has exercised no sort of arrangement, supervision, or censorship”.61 For these reviewers, Men of the Time was a compilation that did not offer an overview. We might equate its inconsistent selection and proportion to looking at a mosaic in which some sections are out of focus. It was insufficiently curated and so did not cohere into a whole. Across the series’ lifetime, Men of the Time was both insistently superseded and strikingly repetitive over time. Each edition’s preface emphasized how up-to-date it was and how quickly the previous edition had gone out of date, but elided the obvious corollary that the same would soon be true of itself. Each edition simultaneously stressed the inadequacy of its predecessor and presented itself as authoritative. This sequential process of emphasis and elision, emphasis and elision, became a concertina-­ like movement through its various superseded editions. This is the inevitable consequence of its attempts to fix the ever-­ changing material of communicative memory as if it were the static and monumental material of cultural memory (or, if less reverent, at least the static and finished “B-series” material of history). The value of Men of the Time lay in recognizing that modernity sometimes requires us to approach the former as if it were the latter: contemporaneity as if it were history. This sleight of hand enabled readers to have access to a compilation of information on living contemporaries, beyond what could be imparted and retained by communicative memory’s informal mechanisms. The radicalism of the Men of the Time series lay in its boldness in ignoring any divide between the present and history. In this contemporary collective biography, that “floating gap” became not a gap but an overlap: a timeframe, and a life, could be both at once. The fact that this uneven and error-strewn series produced fifteen editions across half a century suggests that it served readers’ needs. Perhaps it did give them a sense of overview on the information they needed to know about their contemporary era. Alternatively, its inability to provide a coherent overview would not be a problem if you were not looking for one: users perhaps saw it as a reference tool rather than a panoramic vista. We have also seen that from the fragmentary evidence available, it was read, used and interacted with. This demonstrates an appetite for contemporary collective biography that—as we will see next—the DNB sought to meet with better sustenance.  “Men of the Time,” February 23, 1884, 258.

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CHAPTER 8

Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography

The façade of the Paris Opera building at the Palais Garnier still carries the sculpted busts that were carved into place when it opened in 1875. This fact might not feel surprising, but it means that the resultant hall of fame includes a surprising mixture of names. Some are composers we would instantly recognize (Mozart and Beethoven), but others we might not (Auber, Spontini, Meyerbeer, Halévy and Rossini, whose reputation has lasted the best of these). The latter five had all died within the previous twenty-five years: they were all recently deceased and thus had a particular commemorative draw at the time. Setting their faces in stone, however, makes this impulse a hostage to fortune. Any hall of fame that wants to provide an overview on a group’s or area’s history, or to celebrate the contemporary era’s contribution to that history, has reason to commemorate recent lives. However, including such recently deceased figures within a hall of fame presents various challenges: Whom to choose from among a plethora of distinguished people within living memory? And how to represent them? I have discussed some of these issues elsewhere, but here I show how these challenges could be navigated and mitigated.1 First, some of the risks of ephemerality can be eased by creating the hall of fame not in stone but in print, with its capacity for revision and correction. Second, it is easier to incorporate recently deceased 1

 Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapter 3.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_8

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individuals into expansive lists than minimalist ones. The larger the number of individuals included in a commemorative list—whether in stone or on a page—the more modest a claim is implicitly made for each. Including recent individuals in any hall of fame does suggest that they are in some way equivalent—in importance, stature and/or longevity—to the medieval, classical or biblical figures who stand next to them. However, if the list is capacious enough to include more than one individual per generation or era, it can refrain from the confrontational claim that any specific individual is of unrivalled significance. Instead, it can more delicately propose that each is worthy of remembrance.2 Collective biographical dictionaries (comprising hundreds of short “entries”) are therefore likely to be less controversial than books that claim to select the greatest five, or ten, or twenty, of a certain group, and less controversial also than the sculpted hall of fame. Third, it is easier to include recent lives in ephemeral formats than the avowedly definitive one that I discuss in this chapter. As we saw, Men of the Time (1852–99), with its triennial superseded editions, explicitly set out to represent living individuals. More surprising is how well stocked with recent lives was the mammoth Dictionary of National Biography (sixty-­ three volumes published 1885–1900 plus a three-volume supplement published in 1901; hereafter DNB), edited first by Leslie Stephen (1882–91) until it overwhelmed and damaged his health and then by Sidney Lee (1890–1912). No one could be included in its pages while still alive, but many of its subjects were only recently deceased and still present in living memory. In fact, the DNB features a disproportionate number of nineteenth-century individuals. As editor Sidney Lee noted in the “Statistical Account” that he wrote at the end of the Dictionary proper (though before the 1901 supplementary volumes), 12,608 entries (a full 43% of the total) were on lives from the “nineteenth-Century”.3 Even more significant for our discussion of immersion, 27% of DNB figures had died since 1850, bringing them within many contributors’ and readers’ living memories. Assistant editor Albert F. Pollard records being instructed to write an entry 2  On one Victorian hall of fame, Leeds’ Municipal Buildings (opened in 1884), see Kingstone, 55–56. On the phenomenon more generally, see Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske, eds., Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004). 3  Sidney Lee, “The Dictionary of National Biography: A Statistical Account,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, vol. 63 (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1885), xii. His statistical table does not specify whether these individuals were born, lived the majority of their lives or simply died in, the century he allocates them to.

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on a clergyman who “died this year aged 87”.4 As Regis describes the DNB, “recent and living memory loom largest”.5 This disproportionate focus was only exacerbated in the three 1901 supplementary volumes, which added “Missing Persons” and was dominated by people—including Queen Victoria—who had died during the project’s publication. How do Men of the Time and DNB compare in their responses to this? The previous chapter showed how that former reference work, which biographized living people, was conscious of its potential ephemerality. It dealt with this by stubbornly treating the material of everyday, informally shared “communicative memory” as if it were “cultural memory”, treating still-ongoing lives and events as historical.6 Because the DNB only included deceased people, its editors and contributors had a marginally greater distance between themselves and their subjects than had those in Men of the Time. However, the period within living memory, as the phrase suggests, is not straightforwardly dead and lives on in the minds of those who remember it. The DNB contributors who wrote on individuals they remembered therefore had to turn their memories into nominally historical statements and (unlike in Men of the Time) had to contend with their own and others’ desire to commemorate and perhaps even eulogize. This chapter addresses the DNB’s relationship to recent lives. Although its editors did not promise panoramic-style overview, they promised instead a cumulative, compilation-style overview that included the very recent past. Compilation was frequently presented as scientific, and Cara Murray has now traced parallels between the DNB editors’ pronouncements and scientific writings that sought to face up to the chaos of entropy.7 This chapter examines the various challenges involved in achieving order and even overview out of potential chaos (especially given the ways that DNB editors and contributors were embedded in their contemporary moment) and how they dealt with those challenges. I begin with the ­reasons for the Dictionary’s surprising plethora of recent lives, before considering how individuals were selected for inclusion, and then draw on little-used archival materials to 4  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 14 November 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4. The clergyman in question was Thomas Mozley (1806–1893). 5  Amber Regis, “Un/Making the Victorians: Literary Biography, 1880–1930,” in A Companion to Literary Biography, ed. Richard Bradford (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018), 76. 6  Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” 7   Cara Murray, “Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography,” Victorian Literature and Culture 50, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 92.

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investigate in what sense this was collectively produced biography: What was going on behind the scenes? Close analysis of the entries on recent lives can valuably reveal how those individuals were represented. Elsewhere, I use a digital humanities method, corpus linguistic analysis, to show how DNB contributors used specific terms including “modern” and “always” to instantiate a rhetorical distance from their recent subjects.8 Here I focus on tracing how memories and other personal materials (including autobiography) were remediated into impersonal DNB entries. Finally, I consider what this can tell us about the pros and cons of the compilation approach in offering an overview on contemporaneity. The DNB can be said to speak “with a double voice”, both giving us information about the past and “testimony concerning [its] own contingent making”.9 Scholars have debated the Dictionary’s ideological function. Writing in 1974, Colin Bell was the first modern scholar to examine the DNB’s selection process and concluded that it demonstrates a “hegemony” of the “elite”.10 David Amigoni, testing this claim on the Dictionary’s content, argued in modification that the DNB did not automatically “reflect […] preconstituted elite power”, but made “a sophisticated bid” for it.11 Both Atkinson and Regis have carried out attentive analyses of Stephen’s and Lee’s various contrasting pronouncements about the DNB’s aims and principles, and Murray has now extended that work by bringing those pronouncements into alignment with contemporaneous (and later) scientific and statistical innovations. My discussion develops beyond these invaluable analyses in two significant ways. First, the DNB’s content only partly matches its two editors’— less than unanimous—visions for their project. Although they both yearned 8  Helen Kingstone, “Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography: a Corpus Linguistic Analysis,” in preparation. 9  Christopher N. Warren, “Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB),” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018, para. 4, https://doi.org/10.22148/16.028. 10  Colin Bell, “Some Comments on the Use of Directories in Research on Elites, with Particular Reference to the Twentieth-Century Supplements of the Dictionary of National Biography,” in British Political Sociology Yearbook: Vol. 1 Elites in Western Democracy, ed. Ivor Crewe (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 161–71. 11  David Amigoni, “Life Histories and the Cultural Politics of Historical Knowing: The Dictionary of National Biography and the Late Nineteenth-Century Political Field,” in Life and Work History Analyses  : Qualitative and Quantitative Developments, ed. Shirley Dex (London: Routledge, 1991), 163.

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at times (as Murray emphasizes) for what would come to be called “data compression”,12 I trace here how they struggled to impose that order on their 647 named (and some uncredited) contributors. Secondly, whereas previous scholars confine themselves to published sources, this chapter looks closely at surviving archived correspondence between editors and contributors, striving to reconstruct the first three-dimensional picture of the DNB since its archive was lost in the wake of the First World War. The successive editors of the late twentieth-century revival the Oxford DNB (hereafter ODNB) have proffered different visions of the DNB. Current editor David Cannadine sees it as a “grandiosely-conceived […] monument”, whereas former editors Lawrence Goldman and Brian Harrison suggest, respectively, that it was “remarkably unideological” and aimed at “‘capsule,’ as distinct from ‘tombstone,’ biography”, producing entries that were distilled rather than definitive.13 Colin Matthew even described the DNB’s entries on recently deceased individuals as merely “interim notices”.14 Here, I examine which of these assertions is most accurate in practice. As outlined above, print has an advantage over monuments and tombstones in being relatively easily revised; but whether the DNB’s contributors wrote with an expectation of later being revised is another question. Certain contributors did consider the Dictionary to be a definitive achievement: one declared in a celebratory review of the twenty-fourth volume that “no man living will see the day when Englishmen will regard this noble book of reference as obsolete and antiquated”. He declares that once complete the DNB “can never be wholly superseded, though [as he admits] it will need to be supplemented for the requirements of our posterity”.15 As we will see, however, the editors’ and other contributors’ own views on this were often somewhat more cautious.

 Murray, “Cultivating Chaos,” 96.  Cannadine, “British Worthies,” 3; Lawrence Goldman, “A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography 1882–2004,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 112; Brian Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” English Historical Review cxix, no. 484 (November 2004): 1191–92. 14  Colin Roberts, lead of OUP’s academic board in the mid-twentieth century, quoted by Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography, 6. 15  Augustus Jessopp, “The Dictionary of National Biography,” The Nineteenth Century 28, no. 166 (December 1890): 1011. Jessopp contributed a range of mainly early modern lives (including that for Elizabeth I). 12 13

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Why So Many Nineteenth-Century Lives? The DNB’s disproportionate number of recent lives needs explaining.16 What made its editors and contributors willing to attempt a compilation overview of their contemporary era, despite their temporal immersion in it? We might simply put this down to the staff’s greater knowledge of the period, and more sources available than for more distant periods, but these factors alone do not explain away the important fact that Stephen and Lee were apparently willing—even keen—to include a plethora of recent contemporaries in the DNB. Nor should it obscure the stark contrast between the DNB’s embrace of nineteenth-century lives and most late-Victorian professional historians’ avoidance of writing about this same period.17 As we discussed in Chaps. 1 and 7, this was rooted in a reverence for what Jan Vansina calls the “floating gap” between history and contemporaneity, one for which the DNB showed surprising disregard. Instead, the DNB’s pattern of attention situates it squarely in a different genre context and—as the previous chapter found—lends it more in common with the ephemeral collective biographies that proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century. So why is the DNB so different from contemporaneous history writing in attending to the period within living memory? One reason might lie in the fact that although various professional academic historians served as dedicated contributors (and some contributors, such as successive assistant editors, Charles L. Kingsford and Albert F. Pollard, would go on to have careers as academic historians), it was conceived and produced outside a university context. As Gillian Fenwick has recounted, the Athenaeum periodical was the chief means of advertisement for the Dictionary through its fifteen-year genesis, acting as a forum for “announcements”, “reviews” and as a “recruiting ground for contributors”.18 The DNB offices (at 14 Waterloo Place in London’s West End) were “linked by speaking tube to the firm of [its publisher] Smith, Elder next door”, and were just across the 16  The disproportion is heightened by a contrast with the later DNB’s parsimonious coverage of the twentieth century: especially after the Dictionary was passed on in 1917 to its reluctant new publishers Oxford University Press, later “supplements” were much more modest in scale. As Colin Matthew has put it, “The twentieth century, both absolutely and in ratio to population, is thus much more selective than the nineteenth.” Matthew, “Leslie Stephen and the New DNB.” 17  Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapters 39–49. 18  Gillian Fenwick, “The ‘Athenaeum’ and the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’, 1885–1901,” Victorian Periodicals Review 23, no. 4 (1990): 180.

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road from the Athenaeum Club itself, making visible the project’s metropolitan clubland roots that, as I will go on to show, are visible at a subterranean level in the Dictionary itself.19 The project was therefore not constrained by the increasing move among academic historians away from contemporary history toward the medieval and early modern periods. While these academics were certainly called upon as contributors to the Dictionary, they were also joined by many non-academics: the most prolific contributors by number of entries were Thompson Cooper (sometime Men of the Time editor) and Gordon Goodwin, both non-academic men of letters. Another related reason might be the DNB’s commercial origins, funded by the bottled-water magnate turned publisher George Smith. While the Dictionary was not exactly profitable—Smith poured in around £70,000 and never recouped those costs—it was insistently privately rather than state-funded.20 As Colin Matthew (first editor of the revived ODNB) reportedly viewed the issue, “Commercial dictates help editors to resist the enormous temptations to strive for definitiveness”.21 Even after its first publication, DNB remained a commercial venture rather than an academic one. Robert Faber and Brian Harrison show how tenuously the DNB and even its revival, the ODNB, are tied to the University of Oxford: when the university received the DNB as a gift from the Smith family publishers in 1917, it passed the Dictionary on to Oxford University Press.22 Being located within a publishing house, outside both university and state, arguably gave the DNB greater freedom in selection and inclusion than was available to some other national collective biographies of the period, such as the Belgian, German and Italian projects, which by contrast were “rigidly hierarchical and centralized”.23  Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” 1186.  Leonard Huxley, The House of Smith Elder (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1923), 182. 21  Iain McCalman, “Introduction,” in National Biographies and National Identity: A Critical Approach to Theory and Editorial Practice, ed. Iain McCalman, Jodi Parvey, and Misty Cook (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 1996), ix. 22  Robert Faber and Brian Harrison, “The Dictionary of National Biography: A Publishing History,” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-­ First Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2002), 173. 23  Marcello Verga, “‘Biographical Collections in National Contexts,’” in Setting the Standards: Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography, ed. Ilaria Porciani and Jo Tollebeek, Writing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 97. 19 20

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The form and structure of the DNB are also significant in enabling this engagement with the contemporary. While historians were nervous about compromising the longevity of their narratives by speculating shortsightedly on the significance or otherwise of recent events, the DNB was protected against a short shelf-life by not attempting any overarching narrative, being structured alphabetically rather than chronologically. It was also not structured hierarchically: when obituaries were first introduced into The Times newspaper, they were listed in order of feudal status, but the only sign of this kind of hierarchy in the DNB came in the relative lengths of its entries.24 The DNB coped with the multiplicity of its material by becoming multiple in its authorship. As Booth puts it, “multiplicity is the key to this model of life-writing”.25 The innovation and freedom of collective biography, therefore, comes from nestling its miniature narratives within a nonnarrative form. Intrinsically ephemeral works such as Men of the Time used this freedom to represent the present, whereas the DNB used it to situate the Victorian period—however obliquely—within a long-range national history. We might be tempted to suggest that the DNB fragmented its narrative into an assortment of tesserae, from which the reader is expected to construct a meaningful mosaic. But this would be to over-­idealize matters: the DNB is not a coherent story to which Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee took any kind of avant-garde sledgehammer; it is instead a compilation of tiny and disparately composed narratives, the biographical “entries”. These entries do not form a singular overall narrative, but in aggregate they nonetheless have some narrative-type effects, through patterns of repetition and reinforcement.

Challenge 1: Whom to Include? What does the DNB give us an overview of? Do its entries represent a microcosm of the nation or of its most distinctive strata? (Are they examples or exemplars?) Is the publication a social history or a hall of fame? Booth expresses this double bind in the context of her discussion about collective biographies of women: “The representative woman is a 24  On introduction of obituaries in The Times newspaper under the editorship of Delane (1841–77), see Bridget Fowler, The Obituary as Collective Memory (London: Routledge, 2007), 6. 25  Alison Booth, “Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 273.

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synecdoche of her type. Yet she must to a degree foil the mimetic claim: she is more noteworthy than the mass of women honoured by proxy”.26 The individual represented must be both a representative and a “noteworthy” placeholder for many others. The DNB, somewhat unusually, sought to juggle these two ambitions. This was partly a result of the differing aims of its two editors Stephen and Lee. Lee believed that entrants must be “distinctive”, whereas Stephen was also interested in the idea of representativeness. How, then, were individuals selected? We can gain some insights from an 1896 article by Lee, entitled “National Biography”, that he published in the Cornhill (the journal of which Stephen had been editor until 1882). Here, Lee argued that eligible entrants must be “to a decisive degree distinguishable from their neighbours”:27 The fact that a man [and he repeatedly uses, and means, man] is a devoted husband and father, an efficient schoolmaster, an exemplary parish priest, gives him in itself no claim to admission within the portals of national biography, because his actions, however meritorious, are practically indistinguishable from those of thousands of his fellows.28

This statement means that he is not concerned with representative figures; far from it, people need to be “distinguishable”. Furthermore, he sees these judgments in notably competitive numerical, pseudo-scientific terms. He estimates that in the second millennium AD, the conveniently round number of “30,000 persons” have been distinguished enough to be eligible. Using an entirely circular logic that presumes his and colleagues’ evaluations have been uniform across periods and serenely objective within populations, he concludes: “An infant’s chance of attaining distinction is one in 10,000”.29 Stephen had notably different ideals about the purpose and function of biography, ones that might even seem incompatible with editing a collective biography of eminent individuals. In an article on “Autobiography” written just as he was leaving his DNB editorial post, and published the following year, he wrote:  Booth, How to Make It as a Woman, 4.  Sidney Lee, “National Biography,” Cornhill Magazine 26 (March 1896): 261. 28  Lee, 269–70. 29  Lee, 272. 26 27

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One stage in a nation’s life gets itself labelled Cromwell, and another William Pitt; but perhaps Pitt and Cromwell were really of little more importance than some contemporary […] We are in a tacit conspiracy to flatter conspicuous men at the expense of their fellow-workers, […] and add a stone to the gigantic pile of eulogy under which the historical proportions of some great figures are pretty well buried.30

This passage challenges the very notion that the most conspicuous or “distinguishable” “men” really need any further eulogizing. The modernist New Biography movement routinely presented the DNB as their antithesis, but here Stephen surprisingly prefigures Lytton Strachey’s later attacks on eulogy. Voicing similar sentiments again, Stephen wrote in 1893 in the National Review that “we have to make room [in the DNB] for the less conspicuous people, about whom it is hard to get information elsewhere. The real test of the value of the book is in the adequacy of these timid and third-rate lives”.31 On the publication of Lee’s apparently authoritative essay in 1896, Stephen immediately responded with a rival interpretation under the same title. Here, he suggests that the DNB should also be a venue for obscure individuals. He upgrades them from “third” to “secondrate” but otherwise reiterates his rationale, declaring that “it is the secondrate people […] who become generally accessible through the dictionary alone; that provide the really useful reading”, giving the DNB a unique selling point: “upon such lives […] the value of the book really depends”.32 This might mean that Stephen saw the DNB offering a representative spread across the social spectrum, rather than just celebrating heroic historical agents. But he also describes these as “queer little morsels”, implying, as David Amigoni has highlighted, that they are in some way “aberrant” and implicitly unusual.33 As Juliette Atkinson puts it, these are not intended as a “systematic” recovery project, but designed “to be encountered randomly”, perhaps while searching to find a more eminent life.34 Stephen  Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. 3 (London: Smith, Elder & co., 1892), 240–41.  Leslie Stephen, “Biography,” The National Review 22, no. 128 (October 1893): 172. 32  Leslie Stephen, “National Biography,” National Review 27, no. 157 (March 1896): 59. A similar impetus has emerged recently; see, for example, Michael Wood and Johannes Birgfeld, eds., Repopulating the Eighteenth Century Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment, Edinburgh German Yearbook 12 (Rochester, New  York: Boydell and Brewer, 2018). 33  David Amigoni, “Distinctively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups, and Difference in the DNB and the ODNB,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005): 280. 34  Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered, 221. 30 31

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shows a squeamishness about eminence that leads him to foreground that “second” tier, but this is far from any modern social-science sampling approach aimed at capturing a representative spread. An example entry by Stephen on such a “second-rate” life might be Thomas Aikenhead, “executed for blasphemy” in 1697. Stephen sticks determinedly in this entry to evoking Aikenhead’s life in isolation, without getting carried away into discussing general religious questions. The closest he gets to acknowledging broader contexts is in the final sentence of this one-paragraph account, which states: “A letter published in the “State Trials” from the King MSS. shows that [the philosopher John] Locke was shocked by this perversion of justice”.35 Aikenhead functions as a “queer little morsel” rather than as a representative of an anonymous mass. Nonetheless, Stephen’s inclusive policies have inadvertently led to those “second-rate” Britons being studied more because of being in the DNB: Colin Matthew, the first editor of the new ODNB, made a decision to retain (and often to expand) all DNB entries, so ones like Aikenhead’s have been revised and often slightly expanded by modern scholars.36 The revised 2004 ODNB entry for Aikenhead sets him much more in the c­ ontext of contemporaneous challenges to religion: “The privy council was clearly influenced […] by the fact that irreligious opinions seemed to be becoming commoner in Edinburgh at this time”, and later that “Aikenhead was as complete a freethinker as any in early modern Europe”.37 Not only does this demonstrate the more flexible capacity of online digital publication (far beyond the aforementioned flexibility of print), it confirms the distance between Stephen’s aims and those of modern social history. Even Stephen was not entirely comfortable with this profusion of entries about obscure people. His 1896 “National Biography” article describes, in a tone reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle’s fears of becoming “Dryasdust”, how “[w]hen we go to the library of the British Museum, and look at the gigantic catalogue of printed books, and remember the huge mass of materials which can be inspected in the manuscript 35  Leslie Stephen, “Aikenhead, Thomas (1678?–1696–7),” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885), 184. 36  See H. C. G. Matthew, “Leslie Stephen and the New DNB, Pt 2,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1995, http://global.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/freeodnb/shelves/ lslecture1/lslecture2/. 37  Michael Hunter, “Aikenhead, Thomas,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/225.

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department, we—I can speak for myself at least—have a kind of nightmare sensation”.38 This passage evokes the burden of too much knowledge, too much potential historical evidence: the same problem of scale and proximity we see in Victorian historians’ approach to contemporary history. Stephen makes repeated comments on the burden of too much historical evidence: it is a “hopelessly intricate jungle”; it is an “antiquarian bog” and a “vast morass of antiquarian accumulation”.39 In what was a common phrase at the time in anthologies, though elsewhere used regretfully, Stephen declares that this excessive material requires a “merciful veil of oblivion”.40 Stephen here pre-empts Lytton Strachey’s self-absolving declaration twenty years later (in his 1918 Eminent Victorians): “The history of the Victorian age can never be written. We know too much about it”.41 Stephen admits an “immense satisfaction” at being able sometimes to stop searching, of knowing that a certain fact or person is irretrievable, lightening the load of latent knowledge.42 In a later article, explicitly entitled “Dryasdust”, he nonetheless admits that knowing which facts or individuals need to be retained is often unknowable without hindsight. Just as medieval “ancestors would have been incapable of foreseeing which were the really significant documents” for later medievalist historians, “we must keep everything [so] that we may be sure of not destroying just what our posterity will desire”.43 Stephen’s next image undermines this: he uses the analogy of paleontology to argue that while “one specimen was priceless”, further multiplicity “might tell us nothing more […] They would only repeat what we knew already”.44 Murray places emphasis on this to suggest that Stephen aspired to scientific data compression.45 In the case of the DNB, however, people could not be selected as representative units to stand in for replicating masses;  Stephen, “National Biography,” 54.  Stephen, 55, 59, 55. 40  Stephen, 54. Previous anthologies that used the term lamentingly include George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790). By contrast, Margaret Oliphant evokes the need for such a veil in Margaret Oliphant, “The Ethics of Biography,” The Contemporary Review 44 (July 1883): 76–93. 41  Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5. 42  Stephen, “National Biography,” 58. 43  Leslie Stephen, “Dryasdust,” The Speaker : The Liberal Review 2 (June 23, 1900): 331. 44  Stephen, 331. 45  Murray, “Cultivating Chaos,” 104–5. 38 39

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the unrepeatability and endless variation of human life halted the project’s claims to scientific compilation. Stephen and Lee (and later Strachey) all draw on variants of a fishing metaphor to describe their selection processes, but they use it in divergent ways. Stephen describes “lying like a trout in a stream snapping up, with the added charm of unsuspectedness, any of the queer little morsels of oddity or pathos that may drift past him”.46 The metaphor is used in a similar way by Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, where she describes letting a “line down into the stream” and retrieving “the sudden conglomeration of an idea”, “insignificant” though it may look to the casual observer.47 All three suggest a methodology of serendipity, however much Stephen’s usage underplays the hard-fought editorial battles over the DNB’s composition. By contrast, twenty-two years after Stephen’s 1896 article, Lee gave a talk about his role as DNB editor at the English Association. Evoking an allegory from Ariosto, he talks of each individual wearing a medal round their neck, which after their death drifts down the river of Lethe. He describes how “[a] few of the stamped medals were caught as they fell towards the waters of oblivion by swans. [These] swans are biographers, whose function it is to rescue a few medals of distinguishable personality from the flood of forgetfulness into which the mass is inevitably destined to sink”.48 This statement suggests, like his numerical calculations earlier, something serene and fated: a scenario in which both those individuals “destined” to sink without a trace, and those destined to be “rescued” for the DNB, do so without partisan intervention: a would-be-scientific, would-be professional model at least as disingenuous as Stephen’s claim to amateurism and effortless serendipity. In the same year, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians proposed dealing with excessive information about the recent Victorian past by “rowing out over that great ocean of material, and lowering down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen”.49 Whether intentional or not, this echoes Stephen, who in his 1900 “Dryasdust” article had expressed confidence that there would be plentiful materials for future study of the  Stephen, “National Biography,” 63.  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6. 48  Sidney Lee, The Perspective of Biography (London: The English Association, 1918), 4. 49  Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 5. 46 47

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nineteenth century: “Dip anywhere into the great ocean of history and you will bring up plenty of specimens”.50 Like Strachey, Stephen suggests a pseudo-scientific sample, though Strachey uses it with particularly heavy irony, especially since the figures he selects are by no means representative. The very flexibility of usage and contrasts within the uses of this metaphor shows us how familiar methods could be reconceived and reframed in professionalized terms and thus how flimsy the sheen of “mechanical objectivity” might be.

Challenge 2: Size and Scope How big should the DNB be? It faced the paradox common to all the compilation projects we have explored: the more items in the collection, the closer approximation of plenitude and therefore in one sense the better chance of providing an accurate overview. However, the more items that were compiled, the harder it was to achieve any singular position of overview on them, and in practice, the less the chance of getting the project finished! Europe was littered with earlier, half-completed collective biographies, making Stephen and Lee determined to avoid such a fate, but by the late nineteenth century various European countries (especially those newly established and seeking to consolidate nationalist sentiment) had successfully produced such works, putting Britain under pressure to catch up.51 However divergent the two editors’ views might be on matters of selection, they converged on one point: the need to keep the Dictionary’s scale within manageable bounds. Sixty-six volumes and over 30,000 lives might not seem manageable and did not always feel so at the time, but it was the result of some very stringent limits on inclusion and on the form of the entries themselves. In his opening announcement of the proposed DNB project in the Athenaeum in December 1882, Stephen mentioned his intention to resist including “names which are only names”, a phrase he uses to refer to people who “are known only by the title-page of some obscure book”, without concomitant knowledge of their life.52 This exclusion  Stephen, “Dryasdust,” 332.   National collective biographies completed before DNB include those in Sweden (1835–57, 23 volumes) and the Netherlands (1852–78, 21 volumes), while equivalent projects had been initiated in Austria and Belgium in the 1860s, Germany in the 1870s, Denmark and the USA in the 1880s. See Keith Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–16. 52  Leslie Stephen, “A New ‘Biographia Britannica,’” The Athenaeum, December 23, 1882. 50 51

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provoked a published letter a fortnight later by H.  S. Ashbee, where he insisted that such individuals “must not be omitted”.53 Stephen’s response the following week was to reassure Ashbee that “I quite agree with him that obscure names are of the greatest importance, and that the value of the dictionary will depend chiefly on the number and thoroughness of such articles”, but that names that are “merely names […] belong […] to the bibliographer, not the biographer”.54 This policy demarcated a cut-off point, though by itself it would not prove sufficient at keeping the pagecount down. The biggest issue here was staffing. The DNB core salaried staff was tiny (much as is the ODNB’s today): it consisted of the editor and a maximum at any one time of two assistant editors: Charles L. Kingsford (1889–90), W. A. J. Archbold (left November 1892, but continued to write multiple entries), James Tait (briefly in the summer of 1891), Thomas Seccombe (1891 onward) and Albert F. Pollard (1893 onward). In corollary, the project relied upon a large number of regular contributors, making it a collectively produced collective biography. Problems emerged when each contributor inevitably thought his (or more rarely, her) subject deserved more space than it could be permitted. The surviving collections of Stephen’s letters to contributors showcase the elaborate, even exhaustive, techniques of polite pressure and assurances with which he sought to keep those contributors to his desired timescales and approaches. Murray has detailed how Stephen recalled such exchanges in his memoir, but by examining the correspondence itself we can see how fraught these were. One letter of 1883 to the Essex antiquary Miller Christy reads: “By all means take your time. I should be glad to have the articles as soon as convenient but it is not essential to have them at once. // I fixed the date—my way of indicating as well as I could the rate at which it is desirable to get the work done”.55 The note of anxious frustration and urgency is readily apparent to an outside observer, but he evidently did not feel able to make any more explicit statements of deadlines. Three years later he was writing to Christy to “assign the life to you” of the fifth Earl of Selkirk (1771–1820). The contract for this “life” includes a note from Stephen asking Christy to pay “particular attention to

 H. S. Ashbee, “A New ‘Biographia Britannica,’” The Athenaeum, January 6, 1883.  Leslie Stephen, “The New Biographical Dictionary,” The Athenaeum, January 13, 1883. 55  Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, October 25, 1883, MS Eng Lett c.462 (item 105), Bodleian Library. 53 54

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the necessity of condensation”.56 Promptness and scale were issues of constant negotiation and stress. Another of Stephen’s concerns was “proportion”. In a letter to the Manchester historian T F. Tout a further three years later explaining why he had edited down Tout’s article on Henry IV, Stephen apologizes for the “unwelcome labour to myself” and “diminishing the results of very hard work of yours”, but explains that he had to make the cuts because it would otherwise have been “out of proportion to other articles and similar people”.57 Such comments reveal the way in which hierarchies of importance were indicated in the Dictionary through entries’ comparative length. It also encapsulates the editor’s challenge: he was the only one with overview of the whole project, while individuals pleaded their corners from every direction. Once Lee became editor in 1891, he dealt with these problems in a different way. By contrast with Stephen’s, his instructions are notably clear. In a postcard of 1883, when he was still only an assistant editor, he gives Tout (at this point an aspirant DNB contributor) a numbered list of advice: ( 1) send in your list with all speed (2) suggest no names that are not of real importance or only mentioned in obscure authorities (3) include not only names with the biographical details concerning which you are already acquainted, but any name which is so far familiar […] as to enable you to find at once the authority, where information could be found. To know the first-rate authorities is all in all.58 His strict editorial clarity is also visible in the instructions he gave contributors with their contracts. Comparison of the various contracts contributors were sent over the years gives us an insight into the issues the editorial office was facing, as it responded by adding to its list of instructions. The original list of “rules” drawn up by Stephen focuses primarily on 56  Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, 29 October 1886, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. c. 462 (item 108). 57  Leslie Stephen to T. F. Tout, 27 June 1889, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/ 1140. 58  Sidney Lee to T. F. Tout, 2 July 1883, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/672.

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referencing. On length, it states only: “The general aim should be to give from original authorities the most condensed statement consistent with fullness of information”.59 Later contracts from 1891 onward put this closing statement at the top of the page, and add: “The utmost care should be devoted to the selection of facts, and to their appropriate arrangement. Discussion of points of controversy should be as terse and decisive as possible”.60 In a letter to contributors of 1895 accompanying the list of “S” names, Lee adds an additional reminder: “I deem it needful … to repeat with renewed emphasis those counsels of conciseness which the Editors have previously offered you, and to point out the obligation that lies upon me of insisting with increased energy on their strict observance”.61 These priorities were so well known, and clearly so oft repeated, that at the celebratory dinner held to thank George Smith in 1894, Lee’s toast to Smith makes the following joke: “In my ordinary way of life I am no lover of heroics, as some of you may say you know to your cost—(laughter)—and it has occurred to me that I should be meting out to Mr Smith the strictest justice were I to clothe my remarks in the Spartan simplicity of a dictionary article”.62 The style of the DNB was (mostly) not that of the toast, the eulogy or the obituary, as I discuss more fully in the final section of this chapter. Despite all of these pleas (and perhaps explaining them somewhat), assistant editor A. F. Pollard’s letters home to his parents from his work at the DNB comment that “the Dictionary seems to be continually swelling in proportion, and unless we begin to draw in, we certainly shall not finish it this century”.63 A few months later, he relates how “Mr. Smith has been expressing a wish that the Dictionary would be completed in 60 volumes, but it certainly will not, at the rate we are now going”.64 A compilation in “proportion” requires each piece to defer its interests to the dimensions of 59  Leslie Stephen, contract for C. L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, 19 November 1889, London University Library special collections, MS900/5. 60  Contract for C.  L. Kingsford to complete specified entries for DNB, [n. d.] 1891, London University Library special collections, MS900/6. 61  Sidney Lee, “Dictionary of National Biography” letters to contributors, 9 November 1895, MS900/37. 62  “The Dictionary of National Biography: Dinner to Mr. George Smith,” 1894, London University Library Special Collections, MS900/62, 2. 63  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 9 May 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4. 64  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 5 September 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4.

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the whole: imagine a jigsaw puzzle where some pieces but not others are expanded in scale, and it will never fit together. However, the DNB was neither a mechanical process nor an instantaneous one—it was the apotheosis of the Victorian serial publication model—and as a result, overarching control over the final product was never an option.

Challenge 3: Office Politics In which senses was this “collective” biography? What was going on behind the scenes, and what were the dynamics among the staff, and between them and the contributors? Archival research exposes some of the (understandable) frictions that emerged in producing the DNB. Surviving correspondence shows that the production process was neither monumental and monolithic, nor straightforwardly objective. The sense of contested but powerful hierarchy we have seen among prospective entries for inclusion is also visible among prospective writers of those entries. Surviving correspondence suggests that there was a scramble for the plum lives. Lee wrote to the young Tout in 1883: “I obtained from Stephen permission to send you the forms etc, but I find that in actually assigning names he deals with new people very cautiously and desires to test them carefully himself”.65 Stephen himself wrote to Miller Christy: “I have had to assign the other names to old contributors; but should be obliged if you would look at the proofs”.66 He pre-empts any potential chagrin on Christy’s part at losing out on these commissions by implying that he is constrained by the pride or expectations of others. Pollard, writing home to his parents in 1893 under Lee’s editorship, implicitly echoes this interpretation: “I have got lots of articles to do for the next or rather next but one volume of the Dictionary […] I shall have to specialize on the early 16th cent. because the very early people are snatched up by specialist contributors, and besides there are very few of them”.67 The main difference between the two is that Stephen presents himself as bowing to precedent (“old contributors”; though at that point the DNB had only been running for just over a year), whereas Pollard presents Lee as deferring to 65  Sidney Lee to T. F. Tout, 2 July 1883, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1/672. 66  Leslie Stephen to Miller Christy, contract for life of Selkirk Douglas, 29 October 1886, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. c. 462. 67  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 21 February 1893, University of London special collections, MS860/1/4.

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“specialis[m]”, again reinforcing the contrast between the two editors as man of letters versus would-be professional. Both nonetheless bow (gratefully?) to the simplifying dictates of a hierarchy of experience. The in-house editing processes, the vagaries of attribution and the systematic occlusion of female contributors, however, complicate any such hierarchies. In the published DNB, each entry closed with a discreet set of initials which, if cross-checked against a list of contributors, would reveal the name of its author. However, in practice, things were not quite this simple, and each entry was a product of relationships between editors, contributors and assistant editors. Occlusion of authorship was not the only issue: interventionist editing could cause frustrations too. Historian and DNB contributor Charles. H. Firth, in recalling his work on the Dictionary, implicitly criticized the in-house assistant editors for meddling: Their work upon the articles of other people was not confined to the elimination of verbiage and the correction of erroneous statements; they inserted fresh biographical facts, information about portraits, and bibliographical details. Some articles were partially rewritten; a paragraph or a column was often added; once the assistant editors increased a three-page life to nine pages. To another life Lee added about ten pages, and his initials appeared at the end beside those of the original author. An article which was completely rewritten in the end became anonymous, and anonymity was also the custom when an author found the alterations more than he was willing to accept.68

Laurel Brake interprets this interventionist editing process as one of the “problems which plague[d] the Dictionary as a whole”, since it reduced the “immediacy and special knowledge” of contributors who had known their subjects personally.69 However, there is another side to this process: from the perspective of the assistant editors themselves, that rewriting process was frustratingly necessary. One of those was Firth’s former Oxford student, Alfred Pollard, 68  C. H. Firth, “Memoir of Sir Sidney Lee,” DNB, 1912–21 (London, 1927), xx. Quoted in Laurel Brake, “Problems in Victorian Biography: The DNB and the DNB ‘Walter Pater,’” The Modern Language Review 70, no. 4 (1975): 734. Reprinted in Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 169–87, 174. 69  Brake, 733.

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whose letters home to his parents from university and from his time at the DNB survive in Senate House library. These letters reveal the frustration of his uncredited work. In one letter of 1893, when he had been in post for six months, he wrote home: “Of course, I am very glad to have this position, but just at the present moment it means nearly 10 hours work a day”. He laments how his elder brother’s work as a biologist brings him recognition, “while mine consists chiefly of improving other people’s work who thereby derive greater credit”.70 A year and a half later, he relates another such situation: I have a big job on now at the office: the article on [Charles] Parnell is done by Barry O’Brien but so unsatisfactorily that it will mostly have to be re-­ written, and as Lee is very busy just now, I have to collect all the requisite information for a more satisfactory biography: I think the results of my researches will be incorporated in O’Brien’s article which will nevertheless be printed under his name: if not it will appear as an editorial article and will not be signed, so in neither case shall I get any public credit for it.71

O’Brien later published a full biography of Parnell, but the DNB office was not prepared to accept his partisan rendering of events, and as Pollard predicted, the article was ultimately printed unsigned. In this instance, the work of editors was deemed vital but was frustratingly uncredited. Also printed unsigned was the entry on William Ewart Gladstone’s father John (1764–1851), which contentiously detailed his slave-ownership and which even reminded readers that William Ewart’s maiden Parliamentary speech had been to defend his father on this score.72 Pollard’s is certainly not the most egregious example of work that went uncredited. As Fenwick has uncovered, probably the strongest claimant to that place is Elizabeth Lee, sister of Sidney. She began being listed as a contributor in 1892 (Lee’s first volume as editor), but Fenwick finds that “she had already been writing [entries …] under his [Lee’s] name, for a number of years”.73 This 70  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 25 July 1893, London University Library special collections, MS860/1/4. 71  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 18 December 1894, London University Library special collections, MS860/2/1. 72  Anonymous, “Gladstone, Sir John (1764–1851),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1889, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.10786. 73  Gillian Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography: A Guide to DNB Volumes 1885–1985 and Missing Persons (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 6.

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phenomenon also reminds us of the dangers of doing quantitative or computational analysis based on authorship attribution, since such attribution is not always straightforward or uncontested. My research has shown a remarkably closely networked and mutually acquainted group of DNB contributors. They were networked both with each other and with their recently deceased subjects.74 Social network theorists have highlighted Mark Granovetter’s theory of the “‘strength of weak ties’—the notion that people one knows only slightly can bring one access to a wider range of information and resources than those in one’s close-knit circle, who, precisely because of their intimacy, share overlapping knowledge and contacts”.75 We see both weak and strong ties among the DNB contributors and subjects. While in some ways the Victorian period was notably provincial (due to the prominence of new industrial cities and to the literary focus on the provinces as purveyors of national heritage),76 London nonetheless had a centrality to the DNB. Just around the corner from both the DNB offices and the Athenaeum club was the London Library, founded on the initiative of Thomas Carlyle, led by Tennyson from 1855 to 1892, and designed for men of letters. Helen O’Neill’s analyses have shown that “membership of the Library was ubiquitous amongst the staff” of the DNB.77 The DNB’s content was generated by a group who wanted to represent themselves and their interests. We get a glimpse of the collective culture, and the relationship between writing these entries and becoming one, in the accounts generated when the DNB contributors met together. Publisher George Smith held two celebratory dinners over the course of the project, with one in 1894 and another in 1897. These were held at smart hotels, crowning the more 74  The connections between contributors and subjects are even stronger in the ODNB, where the task of writing a recent life is routinely assigned to someone who knew them personally. Information from ODNB Senior Research Editor Dr Alex May (meeting on 12 March 2020). 75  Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 112. See Mark S.  Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80; Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33. 76  On the literary fascination with the provinces, see Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kingstone, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past, Chapter 8. 77  Helen Anne O’Neill, “The Role of Data Analytics in Assessing Historical Library Impact: The Victorian Intelligentsia and the London Library” (doctoral thesis, UCL (University College London), 2019), https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10065428/.

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regular dinners he held at his house for groups of contributors at a time: as he described, in those cases he “had to take them alphabetically”.78 The grand celebratory dinners brought the editors and staff, who saw each other on a daily basis, together with many of the regular (but potentially geographically distant) contributors. Contributor Maunde Thompson is related as joking whether a toast to good health would be quite appropriate: “A man looked into the face of a man and said, ‘Shall I have your life or will you have mine?’ (Laughter)”. Contributors “did not address their friends with the conventional courtesy of the highwayman, ‘Your money or your life,’ but … ‘Your life, and I will make money by it.’ (Laughter)”.79 Camaraderie though this is, it suggests a confidence among the contributors that they themselves would be granted entrance into the DNB. It also shows a macabre consciousness of the presence of posterity. And this was not the only time this joke was made: Stephen wrote to Thomas Hardy in 1888 that he hoped Hardy would not make it into the DNB, and the way to avoid it was “by living another couple of years—hardly a great price to pay for the exemption”.80 Here we see a strange awareness of the antithetical possibilities of life or immortalization. The accounts of the 1894 dinner show how collective identity could be built through institutionalized celebration. Through the University of London archives, we get to see the dinner twice: once via the speeches themselves in printed form, and again through Pollard, who comments in a letter home that he “believe[s] Smith is going to have the speeches reprinted in a pamphlet form and given away: partly as a memento of the affair, but chiefly no doubt as a bit of self-glorification and advertisement”.81 The hierarchies, but also mutual networks, that formed the DNB team are also visible in the elaborate seating plans for the event, which again we see twice: once in carefully preserved official printed copy and again in schematic miniature in Pollard’s letters home to his parents (Figs.  8.1, 8.2), highlighting the way in which collectivity could be built through proud repetition.  Huxley, The House of Smith Elder, 188.  “The Dictionary of National Biography: Dinner to Mr George Smith” (1894), 10. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford papers, London University Library special collections, MS900/62. 80  Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life Of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 (London: Macmillan, 1928), 290. 81  A. F. Pollard to his parents, 12 June 1894, London University Library special collections, MS860/2/1. 78 79

Fig. 8.1  Seating plan for DNB’s celebratory dinner, June 1894. Reproduced by permission of University of London, Senate House Library, MS900/3/68

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Fig. 8.2  Letter from A. F. Pollard to his parents, 5 June 1894. Reproduced by permission of University of London, Senate House Library, MS860/2/1

Challenge 4: Auto/Biography and Personal Knowledge Remediated The DNB contributors were conscious of being immersed in the same era and milieu as many of those they wrote about: being both temporally and socially proximate. With future readers in mind, contributors tried (as I discuss elsewhere through a Corpus Linguistic analysis) to evaluate their subjects’ significance and likely future reputation, all the while trying not to make too many statements that would expose their lack of hindsight and risk the dictionary becoming outdated.82 Here, I examine how personal materials—both autobiographical writings and surviving memories—were remediated into the DNB’s much more impersonal entries. How much of that intimacy remained? 82  Helen Kingstone, “Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography: a Corpus Linguistic Analysis,” in preparation.

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The DNB’s primary aim was not commemoration. The editors were determined to keep DNB entries far removed from obituaries, and by presenting recent lives as dispassionately as distant ones, thereby also to prevent the DNB becoming dated. Stephen asked contributors to write in a dry tone that conveyed the message “No flowers, by request”, firmly differentiating the entries from eulogies; Lee aimed for “a strictly judicial tone” that would similarly “eschew sentiment”.83 This tone seems to have become so established that when one DNB contributor wrote to another in 1896 about an article he had read, he describes it as starting “as if it were going to be a miscellaneous ‘blether’”, but then thankfully “settl[ing] down to the approved Dict. Nat. Biog. style”.84 As I will show, however, this dry style was not always put into practice, suggesting that contrary to Stephen’s claims, the editors perceived a hierarchy of significance among the Dictionary’s entries and that it was not always possible to be dispassionate about recent lives. Despite the editors’ aims, there is in fact no unified tone or style across the entries on recent lives, partly because their contributors, sources, structures and priorities varied. A very particular challenge emerged when individuals had already narrated their own lives. As we saw previously, the contemporary-focused collective biography Men of the Time received criticism for consulting with subjects on their own entries, allowing individuals’ self-perceptions to color these nominally objective biographies. We might expect DNB to be very different on this score (especially as everyone who was featured had already died), but when individuals had written memoirs or autobiographies, these existing textual materials often cast long shadows over their DNB entries. E. T. Cook’s entry on John Ruskin, for example, relies heavily on Ruskin’s own nostalgic account of his childhood in Praeterita (1885–89). Similarly, Stephen’s entry on Harriet Martineau repeatedly cites, and is structured according to, her Autobiography, which was written in 1855 (when she thought she was terminally ill) but only published posthumously after her eventual death in 1877. The early sections of his entry in particular are full of citations to her Autobiography. Most strikingly, like Martineau herself, he halts his rich narrative after the mid-1850s and covers her last twenty years in only three sentences. His entry is visible in thrall to Martineau’s own 83  Annan, Leslie Stephen, 84; Sidney Lee, “Prefatory Note,” in Dictionary of National Biography Supplement, ed. Sidney Lee, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, 1901), vii. Lee also quoted in Harrison, “‘A Slice of Their Lives’: Editing the DNB, 1885–1999,” 1191. 84  Walter Raleigh to C. H. Firth, 5 September 1896, Bodleian library MS Firth c. 7.

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sense of the shape of her life, rather than one giving equal weight to each of her decades. Thus, even despite that “approved Dict. Nat. Biog. style”, both these entries fall prey in some sense to the hagiography Stephen aimed to avoid. They perpetuate anecdotes, perceptions and even narratives in the image of the subjects themselves. This practice highlights a trust-based culture of biography in the nineteenth century that was mocked and terminally undermined after World War I by Strachey’s deliberately iconoclastic Eminent Victorians (1918). A combination of personal, cultural and practical reasons probably shaped the reliance on autobiography identified here. In the case of Ruskin, Cook was such a disciple of the great man that he was bound to take Ruskin’s word for the significance and nature of his childhood. In the case of both Ruskin and Martineau, the part of their DNB entry that relies most heavily on their own autobiographical writings is their childhoods. Due to the lack of documentation of childhood, biographers routinely see the best way to access it—and its most attentive witness—as that very child’s adult self. This reveals another difference from our own time: a general assumption that authenticity and veracity lay with the (respectable) biographical subjects themselves. As Barbara Caine describes it, “throughout the nineteenth [century], there was a general belief that a person’s own account of his or her life was likely to be the most accurate account of it and hence that the closer a biography could be brought to an autobiography, the better”.85 As Chap. 7 has discussed in relation to Men of the Time, editors of biographical dictionaries where the subjects were still living often sent their copy to the subjects for checking and additions. This assumption underwent a huge shift over the Modernist period, catalyzed partly by works such as Strachey’s. The shift is visible in the fact that Thomas Hardy had his autobiography published posthumously as a biography (1928–30), with his wife listed as author rather than editor. He seemed to believe that his account would have more authority when presented as biography rather than autobiography—a belief that lingers today. Finally, it is worth remembering the speed at which these entries had to be produced. When Stephen was asked to write the entry on Martineau for the M volume in 1893 (after he had retired from the role of editor and Lee had begun imposing stricter deadlines), he probably had only a short time 85  Barbara Caine, “Biography and the Question of Historical Distance,” in Rethinking Historical Distance, ed. Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 68.

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to write it and had the Autobiography closest at hand. These entries were constrained by expectations of trust, but also of practicality. Overall, these examples suggest that in the face of powerful pre-existing narratives, contributors were willing to continue transmitting them rather than asserting an illusory lofty hindsight or affective distance from their recent subjects. Autobiography or memoir could also enter a DNB entry more surreptitiously, through a chain of sources. Theodore Martin’s 12,000-word entry on Prince Albert was adapted from Martin’s earlier Life of the Prince Consort (1874–80), which in turn had drawn on Victoria’s letters and journals, so the entry unsurprisingly waxes lyrical about Albert’s character and personal development. Sidney Lee’s entry on Queen Victoria in turn also draws on Martin’s biography of her husband, hence reinforcing the power of her personal testimony about her own—and his—life. Publisher George Smith later gave Albert’s entry as an example of one that became inadvertently but unstoppably overlong, because “it was submitted to the Queen and approved by her” in that state and then could not be changed.86 While DNB entries relying on autobiography tended to produce subservience, pre-existing biographies of a subject had rather more varied effects. When it was trusted—as in the case of Victoria and Albert—it functioned rather as autobiography did, by providing the main substance and reference point for the life. By contrast, where a widow’s biography of her late husband was less trusted, the DNB contributor might deliberately disavow or circumnavigate it. In such cases, instead of Victoria and Albert’s overlapping chain of auto/biographical sources, we get a bifurcated network of material. A salutary example here is the marital partnership of George Grote (1794–1871) and Harriet née Lewin (1792–1878). In this case, the intervening full-length biography was The Personal Life of George Grote (1873) by Harriet Grote, who had outlived her husband. Since Harriet had died by the time the DNB was being produced, George Grote’s entry was written by his collaborator George Croom Robertson. Whereas Theodore Martin had deferentially adopted information from Queen Victoria’s correspondence, Robertson used surviving correspondence to explicitly contradict Harriet Grote’s recollections, and the source list reads: “Mrs. Grote’s Personal Life of George Grote (corrected above at various points); […] information from the family; personal knowledge”. The mismatch between the widow’s biography of her late husband and the collaborator’s biographical summary was exacerbated in this case by marital  Huxley, The House of Smith Elder, 184.

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complications: in the mid-1860s, after forty-four years of marriage, Harriet discovered that her husband was “romantically attached” to another woman, the sculptor Susan Durant, but Harriet ultimately “made no allusion” to this devastating revelation in her biography of Grote.87 Robertson’s resistance to taking The Personal Life of George Grote as authoritative may therefore have some foundation. While his entry does not explicitly refer to the attachment, he mentions Durant’s sculpted bust of Grote and ends a closing paragraph about his character with the comment that “under the calm exterior there lay, as those who knew him best were aware, enthusiasms and fires of passion which it took all his strength of reason and will to control”.88 This late-Victorian example contrasts with John Forster’s biography of Dickens (1871–73), which concealed his affair with Ellen Ternan, and Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which closed the door on Brontë’s married life. It suggests that the DNB viewed biographies or memoirs by eminent men’s widows and daughters as holding less weight than those produced by other professional men at a professional distance. As ever—and as the Oxford DNB is working hard to mitigate—women lost out in the DNB.89 What about when individuals remained who had known DNB subjects personally? The editors mostly took advantage of the opportunity. Although they were emphatic in many ways about professional distance, they bowed to the practical advantages of “free” knowledge about a person that comes with personal acquaintance with them. As a result, Stephen and Lee commissioned many entries on recent lives from such acquaintances. Every DNB entry includes a closing list of the sources the contributor has drawn upon, conventionally in descending order of importance. Over 450 DNB entries include “personal knowledge” as one of their sources.90 For sixty 87  Joseph Hamburger, “Grote [Née Lewin], Harriet (1792–1878), Woman of Letters,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/11678. 88  G. C. Robertson, “Grote, George, D.C.L., LL.D. (1794–1871),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1890, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.11677. 89  “History of the Dictionary of National Biography,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed January 27, 2022, https://www.oxforddnb.com/page/1016. 90  All but three of these died in 1850 or later. The rare pre-1850 subjects are William Haines (1778–1848), whose entry was written by his son; William Crawford (1788–1847), whose entry was written in 1888 by John Ward (1805–1890) shortly before his own death; Philip Skelton (1707–1787), whose entry by prolific contributor Norman Moore lists “local information and personal knowledge” among his sources, although the two men’s lifetimes did not overlap.

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recent entries, personal knowledge is the top item in the list, sometimes coupled with that other impenetrable phrase, “private information”, making these phrases, respectively, the fifth and eighteenth most common phrases in the entries on people who had died in 1850 or since. The narrative implications of that source material come into focus in comparison with another common phrase in the source lists, “information from”, such as in “information from the family” (a specific phrase used in the source lists of a full seventy entries). While those latter imply a second-hand personalized addition, “personal knowledge” implies that the contributor him-/herself has had to transform personal memories and acquaintance into the distanced form required by the DNB. How did they go about doing that, and what were its results? One obvious cause of “personal knowledge” being the main source of information came when the entry was written by a family member: the subject’s surviving spouse, sibling, son or daughter. As Gillian Fenwick has established, most of the female contributors to the DNB wrote not about other women but about their own male relatives, primarily fathers, brothers and husbands.91 Helen Rogers has argued that we need not see such filial biographizing as a product of passive adherence to patriarchal subservience, and that these women’s contributions could present that male relative as “an exemplary role-model” for female as well as male behavior.92 At the level of the compilation, nonetheless, it means that both male and female contributors perpetuated the imbalance toward male lives in the DNB, and the attendant expectations about what a qualifying—eminent—life should contain. The recourse to “personal knowledge” was also about much more than family relationships. The majority of these entries were not by relatives but by prolific contributors. This reinforces our above findings about how close-knit were the networks that both wrote and featured in the DNB. Contributors were drawn from the same social circles as those they commemorated, and subjects from the staff’s social circles and professional

91  Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography, 8. Fenwick points out that fifteen of the female contributors have the same surnames as their (male) subject. Sidney Lee’s sister Elizabeth Lee is an exception to this rule, since she wrote seventy-nine out of her eighty-one credited entries on women subjects. She also wrote probably several that appeared under her brother’s name. 92  Helen Rogers, “In the Name of the Father: Political Biographies by Radical Daughters,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 148.

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sectors (such as writers and intellectuals) were most likely to make it into the dictionary. Access to family of the deceased did not necessarily yield full or impartial material. Hearing that T. F. Tout would be writing a life of John Henry Blunt D.D. for DNB volume 5, the dead man’s brother wrote with certain basic information, along with the comment that “for certain private reasons I regret that I am unable to furnish you with any details of a domestic character”.93 Here we see one way in which article-writers were obliged to tiptoe around potential demands or blocks from surviving family members, and as Richard D. Altick puts it, “to select, evade, conceal, and extenuate”.94 Perhaps partly as a result of such taboos, some “personal knowledge” entries are surprisingly formal. That is true for instance of barrister J. R. O’Flanaghan’s only DNB entry, on his friend the historian, genealogist and biographer John D’alton (1792–1867), with whom he had written a book.95 It is also true for barrister J. Saville Vaizey’s only entry, on the legal reformer Charles H. Bellenden Ker (1785–1871).96 Even more surprisingly, it is true of entries by a son and son-in-law, respectively, on archivist William Hardy (1807–87) and politician Culling Eardley (1805–63).97 All of these entries focus solely on the men’s professional achievements. These examples and others suggest that contributors with “personal knowledge” of their subject may have felt the need to artificially distance themselves from their memories of their old friend or relative, perhaps over-compensating for any risk of perceived chumminess. Unfortunately, however, it produces some very dry, even unquotable entries, devoid of vivid phrases or anecdotes. When contributors did make use of their personal knowledge, the resultant level of immersive detail could hamper a DNB entry in various ways. 93  R.  G. Blount to T.  F. Tout, 17 February 1884, University of Manchester Special Collections GB 133 TFT/1 94  Richard D.  Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 147. 95  J.  R. O’Flanaghan, “D’alton, John (1792–1867),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.7064. 96  J.  S. Vaizey, “Ker, Charles Henry Bellenden (1785?–1871),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1892, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.15447. 97  W. J. Hardy, “Hardy, Sir William (1807–1887),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1890, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.12294; W.  H. Fremantle, “Eardley, Sir Culling Eardley (1805–1863),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.8393.

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One was length. The celebrated surgeon and antiseptic innovator Joseph Lister wrote the entry on his father, Joseph Jackson Lister (1786–1869), a noted microscopist as well as wine merchant. It is notably verbose (the ODNB version by G. L’E. Turner is only two-thirds of the length); perhaps prolixity was permitted to the younger Lister due to his eminence.98 Another factor was overzealous loyalty: the entry on the dramatist Joseph Ebsworth (1788–1868) is by his son J.  B. Ebsworth, one of at least six children but the only son to survive his father. Perhaps as a result, it is excessively glowing in its reverent loyalty. While we may believe that “[h]e was remarkable for a playful humour and warm affections”, we may be more dubious of the statement that he “enjoyed universal esteem”.99 This entry does not adhere to Stephen’s principle of “no flowers, by request”. Another risk of adding detail is imbalance. The eccentric naturalist Charles Waterton (1782–1865) seemed to invite disconcertingly tangential anecdotes.100 The DNB entry on him by regular contributor Norman Moore is laden with non-sequiturs that engulf the narrative mid-­paragraph, such as this one: In February 1820 Waterton went to Demerara again, and passed into the interior by the river Essequibo. He remained eleven months in the forest, and collected 230 birds, two land tortoises, five armadillos, two large serpents, a sloth, an antbear, and a cayman. This last was caught by a bait on a fourbarbed wooden hook made by an Indian. It was then dragged out of the water by seven men, while Waterton himself knelt on the beach with the canoe mast in his hand. When the cayman was within two yards of him he threw down the mast and jumped on its back, seizing the forelegs to hold on by. The reptile was drawn further up, with Waterton on his back, the jaws were tied up and the throat cut, the object of the adventure, the securing of an uninjured skin, being thus attained. On his return to Liverpool after this voyage Waterton’s specimens were made to pay a duty of twenty per cent. 98  Joseph Lister, “Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1892, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.16762; G.  L’E.  Turner, “Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869), Wine Merchant and Microscopist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16762. 99  J.  W. Ebsworth, “Ebsworth, Joseph (1788–1868),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1888, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.8432. 100  On a similarly tangent-filled account by Julia Busk Byrne of a visit to Waterton’s Yorkshire home, see Rosemary Mitchell, “Julia Mary Byrne and the Passage of Time,” Journal of Victorian Culture 24, no. 3 (September 21, 2019): 289–95, https://doi. org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz021.

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after a long detention, which killed several eggs which he had brought with the object of rearing the tinamou in England, and caused him much just irritation.101

In this paragraph, we jump from a zoomed-out overview of Waterton’s life course to an immersive moment-by-moment account of the cayman’s capture and back again without any obvious warning. This unpredictable shift of pace is generally inimical to the trustworthy plod of the DNB entry and puts the reader on an unstable footing. In this case, proximity inhibits overview. Personal knowledge could nonetheless have enriching effects on contributors’ DNB entries, when the fruits of that knowledge were suitably balanced with the necessary key facts. In Richard Garnett’s entry on his uncle, the journalist Jeremiah Garnett (1793–1870), the personal knowledge enables the inclusion of a small anecdote about Jeremiah’s early days.102 Similarly, Samuel Timmins’ entry on the Shakespearean lecturer Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) includes an unusually substantial acknowledgment of the contributions of Mary Cowden Clarke (1809–98), reflecting his personal enthusiasm for this married couple’s joint work.103 H. T. Wood’s entry on his predecessor as secretary to the Society of Arts, Peter le Neve Foster (1809–79), details how Foster helped organize the Great Exhibition “though his share of the work was not recognized by any of the honours or rewards which fell to the lot of many of his companions”. The entry also relates how Foster wrote for the Society of Arts journal, “generally anonymously”. It comments that “he was never anxious to obtain recognition for his labours” and instead aims to generate that recognition for him posthumously.104 In the best cases, the writers’ personal knowledge leavens the narrative, offering a glimpse of conflicting motivations rather than an artificially seamless life. The entry on Jewish-born evangelical minister Ridley Haim 101  Norman Moore, “Waterton, Charles (1782–1865),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1899, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.28817. 102  Richard Garnett, “Garnett, Jeremiah (1793–1870),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed February 27, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683 120.013.10390. 103  Samuel Timmins, “Clarke, Charles Cowden (1787–1877),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1887, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.5489. 104  H.  T. Wood, “Foster, Peter Le Neve (1809–1879),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1889, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.9966.

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Herschell (1807–1864) is by his daughter Ghetal Burdon-Sanderson, who had previously published memoirs of both her parents and would later write one of her husband. She explains his conversion to Christianity through his being “powerfully impressed by reading a part of the Sermon on the Mount which had been used to wrap up a parcel”, providing an intriguing anecdote and striking image at once.105 The entry by regular contributor H. R. Tedder on the painter Solomon Alexander Hart (1806–1881) comments that “He continued to exhibit until his death but in later years his failing eyesight meant that his work lost its power and his reputation suffered”, admitting criticism of Hart’s work but also explaining its cause and inviting sympathy.106 John Burn Bailey’s entry on meteorologist George Augustus Rowell (1804–1892) lightly scatters personal touches throughout, allowing us to learn that “[o]f a sensitive disposition, he in middle life abandoned his studies and burned his manuscripts, from an unfounded belief that his social position hindered his scientific progress”. Toward the end, again, we are told: “In 1879 he unwisely refused an annuity voted to him by the university”.107 Here, we have a reassuring sense that the contributor has a higher opinion of Rowell’s achievements (and a frustrated but affectionate opinion of his life decisions) than Rowell had himself. In these and other such entries, the contributors evaluate throughout the narrative, adding color without adding excessive verbiage. For those contributors with “personal knowledge” of the deceased, the fundamental challenge was to write for readers potentially far into the future—for posterity—rather than for the lyrical eulogy, the solemn obituary or the dry gravestone. This would make use of their privileged proximity while also taking an overview stance on that life, and contributing a single piece of what could become a mosaic compilation, offering an overview on a long vista of history.

105  Ghetal Burdon-Sanderson, “Herschell, Ridley Haim (1807–1864),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1891, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.13104. 106  H.  R. Tedder, “Hart, Solomon Alexander (1806–1881),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1891, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.12489. This comment is expanded in Helen Alexander’s ODNB revised entry to explain that “his failing eyesight meant that his work lost its power”. 107  J. B. Bailey, “Rowell, George Augustus (1804–1892),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1897, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.24210.

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Conclusions The DNB compilation was intended to provide an overview via immersion in its multitude of lives and their multitude of details. Both editors had high aspirations for the project’s capacity to be comprehensive, though they approached it in different ways. Stephen championed the value of what he called the “second-rate” and “third-rate” lives, but his discourse of serendipity gave way to Lee’s ambitions for a pseudo-scientific selection on the basis of distinction. Unfortunately, as the ODNB has shown, these criteria had the limiting effect of missing out many noteworthy individuals from groups that Lee’s sifting method failed to catch or even ignored, including business people, those outside London and most obviously women. What is more, neither editor was able to put his ideals fully into practice. As we have seen, the DNB was built out of self-perpetuating networks of contributors and subjects, which generated real camaraderie and advanced several careers, but cold-shouldered some of its female contributors and many potential entrants. It was also difficult to keep the DNB in proportion as well as on time, and both dimensions were dependent—as in any multi-authored project—on constant negotiation and irritation. Like any so-called monumental project, perhaps, its smooth façade only appears so until you access the inner workings behind the scenes. In terms of style, Stephen famously called for “no flowers, by request”, and Lee aspired to what in light of Daston and Galison’s work we might interpret as a process of “mechanical objectivity”. This late-nineteenth-­ century influential model of scientific practice, which Daston and Galison describe as being predicated on a suppression of the individual will, imagines that the data speaks for itself. However, as this chapter has shown, contributors understandably struggled between utilizing and denying, embracing and resisting, their close and often personal knowledge of the recent deceased figures they wrote about. Contributors largely managed to resist explicit eulogies about their subjects, but there are nonetheless (and unsurprisingly) still traces of the challenging position they found themselves in, as they sought to write dispassionately about people to whom they were proximate both temporally and sometimes emotionally. When wistful adoration did creep in, however, it largely did not come via the most obvious source, personal knowledge of the deceased. Over 450 entries were written by people who claimed some “personal knowledge” of their

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subject, but while some of these were the subject’s close family or friend, most were prolific contributors reproducing their social and professional networks in the DNB. From both types of writer, some entries became verbose and gushing, whereas others who tried to hold themselves aloof became excessively formal; only occasionally did contributions manage to strike an effective balance. Eulogizing made its way more insidiously into the DNB through autobiographical writings. This issue is most apparent in the entries on those who had published autobiographies, but also in some entries that drew at one remove on private correspondence, notably those on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. While that royal widow’s testimonies were accepted on trust, some others’ accounts were challenged and superseded, as the Victorian biographical culture of trust began to give way to a more modernist ethos. Writing on the Victorian “encyclopaedic impulse”, Natasha Moore points out that “to inventory […] is not necessarily to organize”.108 While the DNB certainly does the former, it refrains from doing the latter. The compilation remains a collection of miniaturized narratives rather than coalescing into a singular panorama. Its picture of its contributors’ contemporary era is buried within a chronologically spread, even disparate, compilation of lives: we only find it by reading a cross-section. The DNB’s intended readers would have used it—and still do use it—as a reference work, its alphabetical structure enabling them to access the information they were seeking. Whereas visitors to a panorama generally turn 360° and get the full overview through immersion, users of a compilation generally have to take its overview on faith. Very few people read an entire encyclopedia or dictionary and nor are they expected to. However, those with access to all sixty-six volumes could feel a sense of at least potential overview, particularly over the recent lives with which the DNB was so replete. The DNB entries show contributors struggling to know how best to transform their immersive, often personal, knowledge into distanced reference material. It raises the question of whether we should write reference works with an eye to the present or to posterity. How long-lasting should we expect reference works to be? In the twenty-first century, is it only online reference works such as Wikipedia—which can be easily and perpetually revised through crowdsourced contributions—that can thrive or is there still a place for long-standing overview? My response to that is to 108

 Moore, “Epic and Novel,” 418.

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remember that all so-called objective reference work is written from its contemporary moment and is therefore contingent upon the perspectives of that moment. We need to read all such reference works as speaking “with a double voice”: both as a repository of information and as a lens onto the moment of its creation.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions: Overview Through Immersion

This book has shown us how concerned people were in the nineteenth century—as we are today—with the proliferation of data and ever-­expanding scale and how inventive were their mechanisms for trying to gain overview on it. I propose therefore a new politics of distance, which involves rehabilitating the important spatial and epistemological concept of overview as a tool for temporal understanding. The sense of overview enables people in otherwise overwhelming situations and scenarios to comprehend and manage this scale and to gain a valuable sense of collective, shared understanding. The concept has previously been tainted by association with colonialist and totalitarian ideologies and an aspiration to mastery, but we can re-embrace it if and when we recognize it as being intrinsically dependent on immersion. Far from being opposed to proximity, attention to detail or particular human experience, one can only achieve an overview through scaling down any overweening sense of self and engaging with what is close, specific and experiential.

From Panoramas to Compilations My book is a story of and comparison between two models of overview— the panorama and the compilation—and their respective forms. Overall, the latter superseded the former across the long nineteenth century. The 360° panorama form, invented on the eve of the French Revolution, rose © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7_9

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to prominence during the Napoleonic Wars, and its elevated, all-­ encompassing, singular model of overview was both adopted by other painters and remediated into textual form by journalists, historians, novelists, poets and dramatists. The compilation model, which was by no means new in the nineteenth century, gained increasing traction from the mid-­ century and took over as the most prominent and favored mode of overview. This process happened partly because of a general rise in the status of scientific approaches, the “mechanical objectivity” and “trained judgement” traced by Daston and Galison. It also happened partly because the sense that the contemporary era was one of ever-expanding scale and multiplicity, which drew practitioners to the panoramic model in the first place, now led their late-century successors to conclude that no single example or sweeping gaze could adequately capture that multiplicity’s full extent. Instead, the only way to offer an overview on the contemporary era would be through immersion in a myriad of mosaic pieces. This process of supersession did not, however, take place in a binary transition from one to the other. The Romantic-era panorama itself relied in part on compilation elements. Its inventor Robert Barker and subsequent proprietors, including Robert Burford, celebrated its capacity to provide a singular all-embracing view, but in practice it was mediated to visitors via keys and written programs that, in labeling and elucidating a numbered list of components, drew on compilation’s sequential practices. If we turn to 360° panoramas’ various offshoots, such as the scroll-based moving panoramas (probably seen by more visitors overall thanks to their greater transportability), some of these offered visitors a single continuous image such as a journey, but many comprised loosely connected but separate vistas and tableaux. The panorama was therefore in some senses a compilation. The Romantic-era invention of the panorama, and the Romantic movement’s aspiration toward holistic and all-encompassing overviews, meant that writers influenced by its historicist ideals in the Victorian period embraced the unifying aspects of panoramic perspective to help them evoke such overviews too. Such writers tended to be dismissive of the compilatory approach: Thomas Carlyle derided John Lockhart’s biography of Walter Scott (1838) as merely a massed “compilation” rather than a structured “composition”.1 Thomas Hardy went even further on this 1  [Thomas Carlyle], “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet,” London and Westminster Review 6, no. 2 (January 1838): 298.

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issue, as he developed a philosophical position whereby the microcosm echoed the macrocosm and vice versa, making reciprocal immersion and overview absolutely integral to an understanding of the workings of time in the world. As the transitional pivot chapter showed of photography and its remediations during the Crimean War, the panoramic model of overview continued to be influential through the mid-nineteenth century: for war photographer Roger Fenton, for newspaper illustrations, for history painter Thomas Barker and for purchasers of his painting’s engraving, as well as for eyewitnesses’ efforts to describe their immersed experience of war. At the same time, a single medium (in this case photography) could be panoramic in its design, but then reconceptualized as a compilation through being exhibited and catalogued, collected and archived. As photography went through a so-called second birth and became naturalized as a medium in its own right, photographic projects became more direct, for instance, creating photo-montages rather than remediating them into paint. People seized upon its distinctive affordances, such as creating photographic archives of portraits or built heritage, or hypothetically using photography to supersede travel and 3D reference-points altogether. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the compilation model of overview came to the fore as scientific approaches more generally grew in prominence and confidence. This was partly a pragmatic response to a continued expansion in scale: in technological production, globalization (mostly in the form of colonization) and population (including democratization and increased literacy that brought more people into the public sphere). Such expanded scale meant that gaining a panoramic overview on everything at once was increasingly unlikely, so that, for instance, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was experienced by many visitors as a compilation of elements rather than a singular panorama. While Henry Mayhew fleetingly envisaged his 1849–1851 survey of the London poor in panoramic terms, elsewhere he called it a “cyclopaedia”. By the time that Charles Booth embarked on a nominally similar survey at the end of the century, he felt constrained only to showcase his statistical findings, despite also having a wealth of qualitative and anecdotal data. Nonetheless, his project’s important color-coded residential maps of London generate a panorama out of a compilation (although the most telling findings can only be detected at close range), showing that—as is still the case with visualizations of statistical data—the two models of overview remain co-­ dependent and intertwined.

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Among the case studies examined in depth in Part II, the Review of Reviews had panoramic pretensions, emblematized in W. T. Stead’s cover design choice of an encircled globe that is reminiscent of one of Carlyle’s or Hardy’s cosmic viewpoints. However, both it and the very different collective biography projects of Men of the Time and the Dictionary of National Biography were fundamentally compilations. They were products of intensive selection processes and remained resolutely unaggregated, composed of individual incommensurable units that one could only experience via immersion (in these cases, reading). These unaggregated, non-statistical compilations do not fit Theodore Porter’s narrative of an early nineteenth-century “rise of statistics” or Daston and Galison’s narrative (re-dated to the mid-nineteenth century) of a shift to a “mechanical” model of objectivity.2 The compilations of Part II align more closely with Jonathan Grossman’s and Clare Pettitt’s recent emphases on standardization in the form of seriality, which involves viewing events and people not as homogenous, but as equivalent and thus comparable units.3 I would suggest that the choice to compile, but not to aggregate, was a principled ideological choice: it refused to reduce or homogenize diverse instances into a bitesize headline or hall of fame. It acknowledged irreducible particularity even as it yearned for overview and enabled readers to explore that particularity for themselves.

Remediation and Intermediality My case studies have demonstrated remediation in action, surveying a broad range of media that addressed overlapping content and drew on intermedial references to do so. How does meaning shift as this content is remediated, and how do particular types of content change the stakes of remediation? Part I showed that panoramic perspective in textual narrative form can be more powerful than its visual original, because the textual genres could add dynamic and narrative dimensions: both movement and temporality. Moreover, the literary instances of panoramic perspective I have analyzed here were more able to be subversive and critical about contemporary and historical events than were the paintings that preceded them. In the transition chapter on photography and its related media, I  Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900; Daston and Galison, Objectivity.  Jonathan H. Grossman, “Standardization (Standardisation),” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (March 1, 2018): 447–78, https://doi.org/10.1086/696912; Pettitt, Serial Forms. 2 3

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showed how the initially ephemeral and almost-instantaneous medium of Fenton’s Crimean War photography was remediated into a hierarchical and would-be definitive history painting in Barker’s work. Fenton’s images also went from having panoramic functions to being a compilation in the Royal Collection. In this way they transformed from a flexible source material into a hall of fame, especially since the royal family collected only the photographs of the officers, ignoring the broader shift in attention during the Crimean War from military leaders toward lowly soldiers. The hall of fame is a useful foil for the two more extensive and immersive models of overview examined in this book. Think of halls of fame such as the Panthéon in Paris, Walhalla in Germany, the United States’s Mount Rushmore or any set of busts on a civic building, and these are typically a compilation in panoramic format.4 They will be a set of nominally equivalent units (namely, eminent individuals), brought together within the purview of a single sweeping gaze. However, the format is by its very nature highly selective and typically elitist. The broader, more capacious and much more multitudinous collective biographies examined in Part II (typically containing thousands rather than half-dozens of lives) can thus be seen as a committed response to democratization and a recognition—long before that of our own time’s Black Lives Matter and decolonization campaigns—that statuary was no longer (if ever) sufficient to represent history. Part II showed that in contrast to statuary, most compilations were not only persistently disputed but also repeatedly updated. We saw how conscious was Stead about his proximity to his materials, articulating the challenge of making predictions and then making them anyway. He and his team transformed the diverse source material of periodical articles (implicitly time-stamped and ephemeral) into Review of Reviews’ summaries and excerpts, making them implicitly representative of their moment in a very first draft of history. We also saw how the elusive, inchoate and ephemeral source material of “personal knowledge” was remediated into Men of the Time and the DNB. In the former, people’s own personal knowledge of themselves was transformed by its format and context into reference material, though this was often clearly self-serving (and criticized as such) and typically had a limited three-year shelf-life. In the latter, DNB entries turned emotive “personal knowledge” into brisk and formal summaries, while also powerfully recording it for posterity.

4

 On halls of fame, see Wrigley and Craske, Pantheons.

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Trust, Big Data and the Big Picture Both models of overview rely on a combination of collaborative production and individualized effects. Panorama paintings themselves were typically team productions, and visiting a panorama was a highly social experience, but each visitor experienced separately their respective sense of overview. This individualized effect is heightened in the case of the literary works that adopted and extrapolated from panoramic perspective: Carlyle and Hardy presented their narratives as if from one individual to another. Even the closet-drama The Dynasts, removed from its nominal stage context, is experienced in the individual mind. Compilations were more irreducibly collaborative endeavors and arguably harder for any single reader or user to gain an individual overview on. Unless you read all of the Review of Reviews, Men of the Time or the Dictionary of National Biography (which was never even their compilers’ expectation), you are never going to have the same level of overview on it as the editor. Probably only Stead ever had a full overview on the Review of Reviews, but the reader was encouraged to feel confident that he did so. Readers’ overviews on these compilations were therefore partly a matter of trust. This was arguably also true for some manifestations of panoramic perspective: perhaps only Carlyle himself achieves his precise overview on the French Revolution, since even contemporaneous readers found it challenging to understand all his allusions, but we can read it with a sense of trust in his overview. Gaining overview through both and either of these models is thus dependent on a compact of trust between producer and consumer. This book’s case studies suggest that twenty-first-century proponents of big data risk hubris in their confidence to use it to answer big questions unproblematically. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier describe how big data approaches leave aside “causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what”, in a process whereby “we can let data speak for itself”.5 However, my analyses have amply demonstrated the freighted assumptions, decisions and selection processes built into all information-gathering. One of the real strengths of the panorama medium and the panoramic mode more generally is its integral and upfront subjectivity. For their part, we have seen the editors and producers of Part II’s compilations to be much more self-aware about their limitations than such aggrandizing but reductive twenty-first-century ­statements. 5

 Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, Big Data, 7, 14.

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These nineteenth-century models of overview can therefore offer us important insights, caveats and cautionary pathways for our own approaches to big data and the digital economy. I opened the book by asking: What does it mean to gain an overview of an era from within? How does one gain that perspective on a period that is still contemporary? My answer is: by seeing it as history. This does not mean consigning it to “the past” while it is still in progress, or trying artificially to codify or delimit the meaning and message of a phenomenon while it is still developing. Instead, it involves consciously situating it in the “floating overlap” that is both “communicative” and “cultural” memory: recognizing that something can be both common knowledge, in the shared ownership of diverse living memories, and already have historical and political ramifications. Our own era reminds us all too clearly that both things are possible at once.

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Index1

A Agency, 34, 36, 76, 81, 104, 194, 208 Algiers, 33, 34n20, 46n63, 50–52 Alison, Archibald, 20, 63–85 Assmann, 15, 42n49, 43 B Barker, Henry Aston, 33 Barker, Robert, 27, 28, 34, 36, 48, 132 Barker, Thomas Jones, 117, 131–134, 143 Big data, 8, 10, 11, 176, 240 Biography, collective, 21, 22 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 33, 47, 63–85 Booth, Charles, 7, 17, 21, 153–155, 237 Burford, Robert, 38, 39, 41, 125

C Campbell Bury, Lady Charlotte, 59 Carlyle, Thomas, 20, 23, 45, 63–85, 192, 236 Certeau, Michel de, 49, 55, 115 Collection, 1, 20, 138, 140, 141, 143, 183, 212 Collective biography, see Biography, collective Collins, Wilkie, 189 Colonialism, 11, 32, 39, 235 Compilation, 1, 3, 5–7, 10, 21 Cooper, Thompson, 184, 197, 205 Crimean War, 20, 33, 113–140 D Dictionary of National Biography, 1, 3, 5, 9, 22, 155, 157, 158, 184, 240

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15684-7

273

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INDEX

Disraeli, Benjamin, 66, 194, 195 Distance, 5, 10, 12, 27, 32, 41, 42, 54, 57, 63, 64, 69, 70, 72, 82, 87, 90, 98, 106, 116, 119–121, 160, 167, 191, 202, 226, 228, 235 Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, 196 E Edinburgh, 27, 64, 149 Eliot, George, 14, 69, 95, 171, 188 Evans Lewes, Mary Ann/Marian, see Eliot, George Exhibition, 20, 34, 46, 49, 139, 149 F Fenton, Roger, 20, 113, 117–133, 137–139, 143, 237, 239 Firth, C. H., 217 Foucauldian, 5, 30, 36, 54, 61 French Revolution, 20, 63–85 G Gladstone, William Ewart, 129, 175n102, 194, 195, 218 Glasgow, 29, 46, 149 Grote, George, 225, 226 Grote, Harriet, 225 H Hardy, Thomas, 20, 69, 220, 224, 236 Hegel, G. W. F., 148, 149 Hero, see Agency Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 142–143

I Illustrated London News, 113–117, 122, 127, 129 Index, 21, 157, 166, 171–174 Intermediality, 4, 110, 112, 238–239 K Kingsford, C. L., 204, 213 L Lee, Sidney, 10, 182 London, 3, 28, 111, 139, 149, 150, 153, 154, 183, 204, 219, 232, 237 M Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 54 Martineau, Harriet, 68, 69, 223, 224 Mayhew, Henry, 4, 21, 150–151, 157, 237 Memory, 13–18, 33, 42, 43, 88, 89, 141, 181, 198, 199, 201, 241 Men of the Time, 9, 21, 155, 157, 158, 179–198, 201, 205, 223, 224, 240 Multimedia, 45, 46, 61 N Naples, 49 Napoleon Bonaparte, see Bonaparte, Napoleon Nightingale, Florence, 118, 131 O Objectivity, 12, 21, 116, 152, 155, 212, 232, 236, 238 Oxford English Dictionary, 1, 147

 INDEX 

P Panorama, 1, 3, 5, 17, 19, 20, 61, 109, 114, 124, 125, 139, 235, 240 moving panorama, 6, 29, 30, 45, 93, 101, 109, 174, 236 Panorama painter, 34, 35 Panorama programme, 29, 30, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44–54, 125, 236 Panoramic perspective, 3, 4, 19, 20, 29, 32, 54, 120, 144 Paris, 4, 39, 55, 67, 125, 199 Photography, 4, 20, 21, 47, 109–144, 173–175, 237 photo-montage, 133, 136, 137 stereoscopic, 142, 143 Pollard, A. F., 200, 204, 213, 215–217, 220 R Rejlander, Oscar Gustave, 137 Remediation, 4, 19, 51, 63, 84, 109, 114, 117, 129, 131, 136, 143, 158, 202, 222, 238 Review of Reviews, see Stead, W. T. Romanticism, 1, 5, 6, 57, 66, 148, 185 Ruskin, John, 162, 188, 223, 224 Russell, William Howard, 116, 117, 120, 126 S Science, 6, 7, 12, 57, 148, 150–152, 201, 207, 231

275

Seacole, Mary, 20, 113, 117–121, 143 Sebastopol, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 133, 139 Selous, Henry, 35, 39, 125 Smith, George, 182, 184, 205, 215, 219, 225 Social history, 76, 82, 84, 206, 209 Sontag, Susan, 112, 113, 138 Statistics, 12, 152, 154, 238 Stead, W. T., 8, 21, 23, 157–177, 238, 240 Stephen, Leslie, 8, 182 Strachey, Lytton, 208, 210, 211, 224 T Thomson, John, 140 V Vansina, Jan, 16, 43, 181, 204 Victoria, Queen, 45, 192–194, 225 Virtual reality, 5, 29, 61, 65, 142 W Walford, Edward, 184, 186, 189, 190 Waterloo, Battle of, 33, 35, 36, 42, 47, 94, 103, 105 Wellesley, Arthur, see Wellington, Duke of Wellington, Duke of, 36, 41, 59, 60, 74, 103, 105 Who’s Who, 185, 189