Censorship Through Explanation: The Corrective Agency of Visibility in Panoramic Perspective and the Panopticon Prison Plan

Abstract

This essay argues that historical parallels exist between Australian colonial image production and early-19th-century prison design in England. It compares similarities in the compositional arrangement of a panoramic perspective from the Van Diemen’s Land colonial frontier in 1835, by minor artist John Richardson Glover, and Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 plan for the Panopticon prison. Richardson Glover’s predilection for censoring the unknown environment in his drawings with rational explanations is associated with the cultivation of spectatorship since 1793 in the popular visual media of the Panorama Rotunda at Leicester Square. The influence of spectatorship is argued to parallel the instrumentality of inspection in the Panopticon plan and together reflect a social rationale that equated biblical references to universal rationalism and anoints visibility as a secular, Enlightenment mode of moral reformation. Spectatorship and inspection in panoramic perspective and the Panopticon plan are shown to operate as corrective forces to govern British imperial interests at home and abroad.