Presenting Milton’s Paradise Lost by means of the panorama, a new medium which had become a popular form of entertainment, excited considerable interest throughout New Zealand. The advertising for the ‘screening’ of the poem, and the reviews, together offer a detailed account of what the audience saw and heard, and include critical assessments of the ability of the panorama to provide a visual representation of the poem. Paradise Lost also became a key factor in a review of a poetry reading by William Golder (1810-1876), a working-class Scottish page 12 settler. He advertised in the Evening Post on 8 June 1869, the day before he began a public reading of a long poem, 'The Philosophy of Love', which took place over two nights at the Wellington Athenaeum, and his performance was subsequently treated to an acerbic review which included the criticism that Golder had ‘caricatured’ Milton’s poem. With the subsequent publication of his fourth (and last) volume of poetry, The Philosophy of Love in 1871, Golder included a preface which sought to rebut the accusation and, in so doing, demonstrated both that Milton’s poem was a living literary work of continuing cultural significance and that, as Renzo Dubbini argues, cultural imperatives shaping developments in nineteenth-century visual media (in this instance, the panorama) were also being manifested in poetry.³

Considering these events together, and keeping in view the role of the Evening Post and other newspapers in providing publicity for and commentary on them, makes it possible to gain further understanding of the energies and interests being manifested in media development in early Wellington, in addition to theatre, music and opera. An important link between them is John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, and the knowledge of that poem shared by Golder and the Evening Post’s reporters. The reporters’ judgments about the quality of the panorama and Golder’s poem reveal how they evaluated the specific performance in each case according to standards explicitly derived from other media forms—from history and landscape painting and epic poetry in the case of the panorama, and from a tradition of literary production in educated English speech and poetic register in the case of Golder’s reading of his poem. The two events between them bring together pictorial, verbal and audio media forms which share a complex history of interactions and technological developments: painting, speech, music, theatrical performance, lectures, and print in newspapers, poetry and pamphlets. But each event is constituted by the specifics of the selection and combination of elements from this page 13 inherited array of expressive forms. In each case, the event is more rather than less than the sum of its parts, and the challenge to interpretation is how to conceive the integrity of the performance event, especially when it is constituted by a new media form (the panorama), or a new conception of poetic production (the democratic poem).

Although developed in relation to electronic literature, Hayles’s emphasis on ‘texts as embodied entities’ is applicable to any media object. One way in which this emphasis will be carried through this discussion is by the use of illustrations of some of the relevant texts, so that the difference introduced by the ‘physical characteristics’ of the medium—for example, the historically specific material form given to ‘the news’ and ‘the page 14 advertisement’ on the pages of the Evening Post, or of Golder’s performance-in-print of ‘The Philosophy of Love’—can remain a present factor in consideration of the issues raised by placing the two events in conjunction. The principal purpose of this essay is to make a case for reading Golder’s poetry, but also the panorama, in a manner responsive to the values and purposes which each embodies, that is, their signifying strategies.