Peepshows made possible visits to sites existing in the imagination, to plunge down Alice's rabbit hole, for example, and to wander through the Garden of Eden in Paradise. The Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park 1851 for the Great Exhibition, inspired the production of very large numbers of peepshows, mostly made overseas and imported. The format lent itself to a wide variety of subjects: to coronations and to state visits and funerals, to pleasure gardens, to trips up rivers and to the ceremonial openings of new railways, to distant views of cities and to tourist landmarks, to military engagements in exotic places, and to the July Revolution and the fall of the Bourbons in France in 1830. The viewer engages by peeping through a tiny hole and thereby discovers inside layers of images, like a pocket-sized stage set. Viewing a Paper Peepshow is an intimate, individual experience that, in the age of television and hand-held computers, gives a real sense of personal discovery. Paper peepshows were light they were comparatively cheap. The new peepshow was equipped with paper bellows so it could be expanded or contracted in a trice. The clumsy cabinet was no longer called for. In the 1820s peepshows made entirely of paper appeared on the scene more or less at the same moment in Vienna, London and Paris. They called for a long wooden cabinet designed for purpose incorporating a viewing lens and sometimes a mirror. Peepshows were introduced in the mid-eighteenth century by Martin Engelbrecht in Augsburg.
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