‘Panoramas’ and ‘Living Pictures’: Dr Barnardo’s Annual Meetings
This chapter analyses how Barnardo created spectacle from the massed exhibition of child bodies in the annual general meetings and fêtes held in Barnardo’s homes and in high-profile public venues such as the Royal Albert Hall. It focuses on spectacle as integral to the philanthropic agenda, such as scale, the boundaries between the real and performed, and the capacity to ‘move’ an audience in a context of amplified emotionality. Barnardo used spectacle to create capital and to represent social change to his supporters. The close relation of spectacle with disaster is crucial; the orchestrated spectacles conveyed both the underlying potential for, and the spectator’s vulnerability to, unleashed catastrophe should they choose not to contribute. Although Barnardo repudiated theatre and associated performance, he nevertheless devised spectacles that presented his brand in highly positive terms as another form of coherent narrative about child reform in the nineteenth century, and the organization’s social welfare work into the twenty-first century.