Panoramic Milton

Bachelder’s Grand Miltonian Tableaux of Paradise Lost, a moving panorama, was first presented at the American Hotel, Auburn, California, on 22 April 1865, and it travelled in the United States and England before moving to Australia in 1867.¹⁴ Paradise Lost was one among three panoramas Bachelder toured together page 22 throughout New Zealand between January 1869 and June 1870, the others being Bachelder’s Grand Historic Mirror, and Diorama of the American War and The Grand Moving Diorama of The Apocalypse. The first exhibition of The American War took place on 6 January 1869 in Christchurch, and was followed by Paradise Lost on 27 February. The Apocalypse arrived later, and the first notice of its exhibition in Dunedin is on 31 May 1869. Bachelder was active in New Zealand as the proprietor of these and five other panoramas: The Naval Engagement between the Merimac and Monitor, and The Grand Moving Diorama of the Kearsage and Alabama, which were exhibited with the diorama of the American War; Bachelder’s Combination Colossean Pantascope of a Tour Through America, New Zealand, and Australia (1872), The Arctic Expedition of 1875-76 (1877), and Enchanted Palace! Silver Lake! Abode of the Fairies! (1880). He also acted as the agent for Thompson’s Confederate Diorama of the American War and his final appearance in 1882 is in advertisements for a minstrel show. The most widely noticed are The American War (1869-1883), of which J. C. Rainer became the proprietor in 1872, and Tour Through America (1872- 1880); Paradise Lost was reportedly purchased by Bachelder’s New Zealand agent, Henry Eastwood, in 1875, and references to it continue to appear during 1876.¹⁵

The first three panoramas constitute a remarkable group, because they take very different subjects and sources for their images: an epic episode in recent American history, an epic poem, and a prophetic vision. These differences are acknowledged in reports on the effects experienced at the exhibition of each panorama: the source of The American War panorama was contemporary places and events known of, or experienced by, members of the audience, a correlation doubly underpinned for The Tour Through America because some reviewers could verify the accuracy of the scenes from personal experience, and Bachelder had brought with him photographs ‘taken for the express object of painting the diorama’ which had been copied ‘with regard to strictest accuracy’ to make the page 23 panoramic images;¹⁶ the source of Paradise Lost was ‘Milton’s grand realisations’;¹⁷ and the source of The Apocalypse was ‘St John’s mighty visions’.¹⁸ But the same criteria are applied to the imagery of all three, the crucial effect being the effect of ‘reality’, whether or not it was thought to have been achieved. A comment on The American War is representative of commentary on the overall effect sought by all three panoramas: to ‘give the scenes and events an air of life-like reality [...] being apparently placed before the eyes of the spectators as if [they] were actually taking place’.¹⁹

In contrast to the reporter’s representation of Golder’s poetic performance, in which nothing was capable of ‘relieving the absurd incongruity’ he experienced, reviewers were typically complimentary about the technical qualities of the pictures shown. But the strong preference for the verbal rather than pictorial representation of sublimity brings out an issue which is central to the discussion of the diorama and panorama—that is, the emphasis on realism in the depictions of scenes and events (a good example, given the American origin of the panorama, is the representation of the warring angels as ‘costumed like American militiamen, formed in squares with mathematical precision’). For this reviewer, the supernatural cannot be visually embodied with sufficient grandeur to retain conviction; in fact, the visualisation of the poem debases its intellectual pleasures, which are associated with hearing the words recited ‘with a chaste and yet forcible diction’. This contrast is emphasised by the importance attached to the eloquence of the reader; Bachelder was found wanting when he was the lecturer (was it his American accent?) and this criticism was also made in Australian reports of the presentation of the panorama, which were critical of the lecturer for not being ‘an accomplished elocutionist’.²³ The perspective of judgment is emphatically literary, the representation of the performance being based on well-established conceptions of the imaginative and linguistic effects achieved by Milton’s poem.

Australian advertisements noted that the paintings were based on those of John Martin, who introduced a new conception of Milton’s poem into the repertoire of its illustration in 1826 by emphasising the vast, imagined spaces in which angelic and human action occurred.²⁴ Lacking the actual imagery of the panorama, it is possible to appreciate what might have stimulated the advertisement’s response to ‘Eve before the Fountain’ by consulting Martin’s illustration of that scene, in which Eve is located in the centre of a still bowl of light pouring in from the wide expanses of sky and framed by the luxuriance and variety of nature.

Illustration 4: Illustration to Paradise Lost, Book 4.452, in [Plates] by John Martin (London: Septimus Prowett, Old Bond Street, 1825- 1826). Ref. 2010/5. Collection reference: REng MIL 1667 Para 1825. Rare English Collection, Special Printed Collections. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

The emphasis, in other words, was on current news and information, communicated realistically by employing large-scale images, lighting effects characteristic of the diorama, and voice, sound and motion in a multimedia presentation achieved by painting the pictures on a long strip of canvas, wound round a spindle and unrolled across the proscenium of a theatre or hall to the accompaniment of music, the pictures being explained by the lecturer.²⁶ All the component elements, and the public interest, which are associated with twentieth-century newsreels, television and digital media are here already in place, if not yet integrated technologically into a new media form like film.²⁷

More information about the social and cultural contexts in which the Paradise Lost panorama was presented can be obtained from a cartoon published in the Ballarat Punch on 19 October 1867, at the time of its first presentation in Australia: page 29

Illustration 5: ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous’. Ballarat Punch, 19 October 1867. Reproduced with the permission of the State Library of Victoria.

One of the jokes concerns name recognition. Not every passer- by is expected to be sufficiently literate to recognise immediately that ‘Paradise Lost’ signifies a poem, or to be aware of the reputation of Bachelder’s panoramas, although the cultural boundaries of literacy do not sharply distinguish members of the working class from higher social levels. The pavior in the cartoon could, for example, be William Golder. But clearly those reading the cartoon are expected to pick up both punning jokes—that is, both Paradise Lost and Bachelder are assumed to be part of current cultural literacy. It is also worth emphasising the context of the conversation: it occurs in the street, with a diversity of social and cultural markers indiscriminately rubbing up against each other. There is the tobacconist, notices for another of Bachelder’s panoramas, The American War , and for Paradise Lost higher on the wall, and one for a tea meeting. The purposes of the Mechanics’ Institute, like the Wellington Athenaeum, emphasised self-improvement through education and instructional entertainment, especially in modern knowledge. Two women are going into the Mechanics’ Institute, where the panorama is to be presented, and they are holding a pamphlet- sized object with the name Milton visible. It was usual for a printed commentary on a panorama to be provided; regrettably, no copy of the one the women are holding has yet been found.

While originating in Europe, the moving panorama, the ancestor of the cinema, achieved its full development as popular entertainment in America. Beginning in the 1840s, an American conception of ‘new world’ space was transmitted to Australasia primarily by means of panoramas of American scenes and events, but including Bachelder’s Paradise Lost.²⁸ One obvious question, especially given the Evening Post’s reporter’s criticism of some of the paintings, is, What was it about Paradise Lost that led to its presentation in this medium? A route towards an answer is through developments in the representation of landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century. Paradise Lost assumed panoramic form for the first time in 1829, when Pandemonium page 31 was presented at the Leicester Square Rotunda. Wolfgang Born reproduces drawings for it which show that the panorama followed one of John Martin’s visualisations of the great city in Hell, and also demonstrates that what he terms ‘the panoramic style’ in American painting was developed by Thomas Cole following his viewing of this panorama. He argues that this style is distinguished by the extension of the horizontal axis of the painting and ‘a shifting vanishing point. [...] The spectator is expected to disregard traditional aesthetic standards such as unity of space and pictorial quality in favor of what might be called a cosmic stage effect’. He argues that the panoramic style distinguished American from European landscape painting during the nineteenth century because of its ‘unique space- feeling’, a response to ‘the realization of the vastness of the country, its unlimited horizon’, and it emphasises ‘exact documentary realism’ and the unfolding of ‘a comprehensive view’. As Born puts it, ‘in the hands of a gifted artist, [...] the huge strip [of canvas] became a painted epic, haunting and arresting’.²⁹ It is exactly these values which can be found abundantly manifested in the imagined terrestrial and cosmic spaces of Paradise Lost but which were released most fully by nineteenth-century illustrators, beginning with John Martin. In other words, releasing the imaginative potential of Milton’s poem both required a new ‘space-feeling’ in its readers and new techniques for representing it pictorially, and contributed to new ways of perceiving the world which evolved together with European colonisation and scientific and technological development.

Callaway adds an important additional value to Born’s analysis when she reframes the notion of a comprehensive view with the term ‘sovereign gaze’, which is ‘as much about the ideology of European imperialism generally as it is about the specific American variant’.³⁰ A further highly-relevant context linking this imperial spectator with other aspects of social change is provided by Bennett in his analysis of the development of the page 32 museum and exhibition in the nineteenth century as sources of instructional entertainment. He argues that ‘the nineteenth century was quite unprecedented in the social effort it devoted to the organization of spectacles arranged for increasingly large and undifferentiated publics’ and that panoramas, like museums and exhibitions, formed ‘a new technology of vision [...] thus democratising the eye of power’.³¹ In Paradise Lost the character who most exemplifies both the ‘sovereign gaze’ and the democratic distribution of power is Satan (see illustration 6), but Golder also exemplifies this new way of seeing, notably in his prospect poems which place the new world to be settled under the observant and ‘roving eye’ of the settler.³²

Illustration 6: Illustration to Paradise Lost, Book 2.1 in [Plates] by John Martin (London: Septimus Prowett, Old Bond Street, 1825-1826). Ref. 2010/4. Collection reference: REng MIL 1667 Para 1825. Rare English Collection, Special Printed Collections. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

A significant inference from this re-presentation of Paradise Lost as a panorama is that the same values were attributed by audiences (if not all the reporters) to Milton’s poetic scenery as to the contemporary scenes typically represented in this popular medium. If spectators were being presented with ‘mirrors’ of actual historical events, which emphasised the reality of those events and sought to provide authoritative knowledge about them, then the events narrated by Milton in Paradise Lost and pictorially realised in the panorama may be understood to have the same significance. And John Martin’s illustrations provided for the nineteenth century what films like Star Wars, or a television series like Babylon 5 (1994-98) provided for the later twentieth century: a visual actualisation of realms beyond human experience but which are brought within the imaginably real by the power of artistic depiction. The obvious obstacle to this line of thought is the attribute of ‘exact documentary realism’, but it is worth dwelling for a moment on its possible implications for reading Milton’s poem. Both Paradise Lost and its illustrators provide access to an accepted, Christian version of reality—the worlds of heaven, hell and paradise before the world as we know it came into existence—to which there is no direct experiential access. The Wellington Independent’s report locates the problem with the panorama’s images not in their lack of truth, but in the poet’s ‘most exaggerated and impossible conceptions’ which they illustrate. On the other hand, the angelic narrator Raphael, when considering the problem of narrating events beyond ‘the reach/Of human sense’, advises Adam that his account has to be understood figuratively but then allows for another possibility: ‘what if Earth/Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein/Each to other like, more then on Earth is thought?’ (Paradise Lost, 5.571-576). This understanding is echoed by a reporter in Auckland who, in a complimentary review of The Apocalypse, wrote that ‘the power of the artist’s pencil [...] gives life and reality to forms that to the ordinary mind are dim and shadowy’.³³ As a world distant from the here and now of its page 34 spectators’ lives, the world of Paradise Lost is of the same order as the worlds of foreign cities and peoples, historical and contemporary events which dominated the panoramas, or real places in which astonishing events took place but which could only be known by most people through representations in image and narration. In this respect, I would suggest, just as the panoramas of recent battles brought news of them to places and people remote from their occurrence by employing the conventions of pictorial realism, so the panorama of Paradise Lost sought to present realistically the origins of the world according to a Christian and Miltonic conception of it. In the process, it revealed the modernity of the poem and contributed to dissemination of a new ‘space-feeling’ among a widespread popular audience shaped by progressivist conceptions of society and knowledge and actively engaged in imperial expansion.

Across the territories of the British Empire, and especially in the United States, evangelical Protestantism particularly emphasised the twin requirements of realism and instruction in entertainment.³⁵

In Dick’s conception, the panorama as represented by the newspaper reports through fragmented reference to the diversity of prior media forms becomes an integrated medium with its own proper aesthetic, intellectual and cultural purpose, and technological apparatus, ‘physical characteristics and signifying strategies’ working together.