The Panorama in/of Nineteenth-century New England: Wording Nature’s Spectacle

Abstract

The 360-degree medium had become a popular way to represent landscapes (as well as historical events) in both Europe and the US by the mid-nineteenth century. “I went to see a panorama of …” – a phrase Henry David Thoreau uses twice in his late essay “Walking” – was a common reference to an already common practice in New England in the late 1850s. Thoreau was never enthusiastic about landscape painting always preferring the landscape itself, but it seems, thrilled as he was with all technical/scientific innovations, that the panoramic paintings in specific, with their capability of revealing an all-encompassing view of a particular landscape, gave him the idea of how to achieve a similar effect with words. Dealing with H. D. Thoreau’s late essays, mostly “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples,” this paper underscores their intense visuality as a mode of mature Thoreau’s nature per se, already environmentalist thinking: Thoreau’s as if winding 360-degree verbal panorama of New England’s Fall is made to provide a most thorough view of his native landscape and thus, by keeping its readers/viewers immersed in the powerful, nearly optical illusion of being surrounded with the real amazing landscape, it does, in fact, preserve the exceptionally picturesque Concord environment – poetically, ecocentrically, transcendentally, why not even really.