Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Helen Kingstone is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her first book, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. She co-chaired a Wellcome Trust-funded Humanities and Social Sciences network on ‘Generations’ from 2019 to 2021, and has been a co-director of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Generations at the University of Surrey.

“Kingstone’s study effectively builds on the work of previous scholars – particularly regarding the nineteenth-century panorama – by tying the panoramic perspective … to the notion of writing one’s history. Scholars of the visual and material will find Kingstone’s study a timely intervention in the field, offering a new perspective on how the Victorians saw themselves and their history.” (Michelle Reynolds, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 24 (1), 2024)

• 1. Introduction: Overviews of the Present.- Part I: Panoramic Perspective.- 2. Contemporary History in Panoramas.- 3. Panoramic Perspective in Histories of the French Revolution: Thomas Carlyle Versus Archibald Alison.- 4. The Napoleonic Wars from Near and Far: Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts.- Part II Transition: Between Panoramas and Compilations.- 5. Photography Remediated in the Crimean War: Illustration, Exhibition and Collection.- Part III: Big data: Compilations of Contemporaneity.- 6. An Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data and The Review of Reviews.- 7. Ephemeral Collective Biography: Men of the Time (1852–99).- 8. Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography.- 9. Conclusions: Overview Through Immersion.