“A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet”: Virtual Travel and the Panoramic Perspective

The collection of materials assembled in Vol. 5 of the complete works of Walter Benjamin under the title Das Passagen-Work, first published in 1982 and translated in 1999 as The Arcades Project , explores, through a montage of quotations interspersed with brief commentaries by Benjamin, the shopping arcades (passages) of Paris as emblematic of the “primal history” (Urgeschichte) of the nineteenth century. Among the related cultural phenomena that Benjamin returns to again and again in these sketches, drafts, and “exposes” is the panorama or diorama. ¹ Although Benjamin is specifically concerned with fin-de-siecle Europe, rather than England, the panorama was also a defining artifact of Victorian culture, enacting many of the contradictions inherent in Victorian attitudes toward representation, toward travel as a means of “knowing” other places, and toward the increasing complexity of the nineteenth-century world. Just as the Parisian passage organized the flow of commerce into “miniature worlds” that could compel and direct the attention of buyers (Benjamin 3), so the Victorian panorama promised a synthesis and condensation of an entire landscape that would allow the viewer to comprehend and consume it.