ABSTRACT
The popularity of the two Overland Mail shows was given a fillip by the early death of Thomas Waghorn on 7 January 1850, a man who claimed to have established the new, significantly shortened, route to India in the 1830s and 1840s. In the nineteenth century, the moving panorama was an important means of helping British audiences envisage the global circulation of goods, people and information. The Overland Mail panoramas exemplify one important way that nineteenth-century modernity assimilated individual and local subjectivities into the global. Just as communication and trade networks were international, so was the panorama phenomenon. John Banvard inaugurated a craze for 'monster' American panoramas. While the various Overland Mail and Mississippi shows are the most striking example of the way panoramas were often structured around emerging trade and travel networks, they were far from alone. Other transport networks were also turned into panoramas.
