Understanding the Field of Waterloo: Viewing Waterloo and the Narrative Strategies of the Panorama Programmes

The season of the Waterloo panoramas began in March 1816, about nine months after the battle on 18 June 18156. The Waterloo panoramas were exhibited in London as well as across the country. Focusing on the finale on the field of Waterloo and highlighting the human cost of the French Napoleonic wars, they brought the battle to life as late as 1842. This article, which is on the viewing experience inside the panorama, examines narrative techniques used in the surviving panorama programmes in order to determine how they address and involve spectators; it challenges the idea that visitors of a panorama were fully immersed and imagined to be part of the scene, and, therefore, unable to look or judge for themselves. The viewing of any battle inside a panorama facilitated a communal experience and helped to acknowledge national sacrifice, but, as this article will show, due to the growing distance between the battle as a historical event and the visit to a Waterloo panorama in real time, explanations about the visual response lost their power to persuade