“viewing souvenirs: peepshows and the international expositions”

Journal of Design History Vol. 15 No. 2 © 2002 The Design History Society. All rights reserved

Viewing SouvenirsPeepshows and the International Expositions

Amy F. Ogata

This article considers how the international exposition was represented in peepshowsouvenirs, folding paper devices that gave a three-dimensional view of the interior. UsingWalter Benjamin's notion of the world's fair as a phantasmagoria, I argue that the opticalsouvenirs produced for international expositions reconfirmed the enchanted visual experiencein a way that other mass-produced souvenirs could not and, moreover, that this heldimplications for both popular consumption and collective memory.

Keywords: Benjamin, Walter—expositions universelles—international exhibitions—peepshows—popular entertainment—souvenirs

The international expositions that marked the indus-trial age were carefully designed spectacles organizedto teach through visual impression. Grandiose dis-plays of technology, people and the commodities ofindustrial manufacture regularly drew visitors to thecapitals of Europe and Britain as major touristattractions. Indeed, the spectacular qualities of nine-teenth-century expositions made them not only away to inculcate lessons of nationalism and principlesof taste and consumption, but also provided a formof successful entertainment.1 In his Passagen-Werk (orArcades Project), an outline for the history of thenineteenth century, Walter Benjamin observed thatworld's fairs 'provide access to a phantasmagoriawhich a person enters in order to be distracted.'2

Benjamin's emphasis on the magical, even deceptive,aspects of optical experience offers a useful means forreconsidering the visual culture of world's fairs.Beyond just spectacle, the phantasmagoria is adreamlike construction that renders physical things,such as exposition buildings and objects on view,into a play of representations. While scholars haveexamined the politics of vision and the commodityculture of expositions, the optical—and social—effectsof popular souvenirs have not been addressed.3 As atourist industry developed around the expositions,souvenir objects became an intrinsic part of the

material culture of the fair and an important meansfor the way it was subsequently remembered.4 Thepeepshow, a foldout paper construction with printedscenes and a peephole, not only answered thetourist's desire for a memento, but allowed thespectator to relive the visual experience of theexhibition. In light of this, I wish to explore howpeepshow souvenirs reified the concept of the 'phan-tasmagoria' for both popular consumption and col-lective memory.

Benjamin uses the term 'phantasmagoria' to sug-gest the deceptive and spectacular experience ofcommodities and capitalism in the nineteenth cen-tury.5 Building on Marx's discussion of the magicalquality of commodities and their power over theconsumer, Benjamin offers the notion of the phant-asmagoria as a means of theorizing the visual andpsychological effects of capitalism on social life.6

Phantasmagorias, however, were also actual perform-ances in which spectral representations, created withthe aid of an optical device such as the magic lantern,appeared in a darkened room.7 Figures that recededdramatically or rushed forward in partial light seemedthree-dimensional, but were in reality only phant-asms or visual tricks. While the magic lantern wascontinuously popular during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, by the end of the nineteenth

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century the word 'phantasmagoria' suggested some-thing less technological than metaphorical.8 In thetwentieth century, Benjamin and others associatedwith the Frankfurt School adopted the term 'phantas-magoria' to unmask the intense visual experience asthe illusory nature of the commodity itself.9 Benja-min, moreover, explores the particular relationshipbetween dreamlike images and built forms. Shoppingarcades, domestic interiors and international exposi-tions became bourgeois spaces of enchantmentwhere the viewer experienced dreamlike representa-tions that veiled social realities. From display win-dows to the city of Paris itself, the phantasmagoriaallowed solid objects to become spectral representa-tions venerated by an audience that was itself ondisplay. The experience of phantasmagoria is, there-fore, useful in describing a nineteenth-century visualimpression and for understanding the conditionedrelationship between viewers, commodities andrepresentations.

Optical devicesOptically constructed images of the world in minia-ture were pervasive long before the first internationalexhibition. The peepshow flourished in its mostpopular form in the late eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies.10 Early peepshows were large boxes with asmall hole on one face, which, when light wasadmitted, allowed a regulated view of the interiorspace.11 The drawn and printed images, usually cutout and placed in succession in a wooden box,offered the viewer three-dimensional scenes ofcities, battles, landscapes or biblical events. Widithe Enlightenment, as visual information was increas-ingly assimilated through edifying diversions and'philosophical amusements', peepshows flourishedas elaborate optical devices involving various lenses,mirrors and engraved scenes that both amused andinstructed.12 Model theatres, peepshow-like devices,captured landscapes and also detailed interiorspaces.13

Late eighteenth-century peepshows were knownby many different names and took different forms,but had in common an appeal both for educated elitesand popular audiences.14 While gentlemen collectedengravings and optical devices for their privateamusement, peepshow men exhibited their largeviewing boxes, which often held several different

series of images, to crowds. The peepshow man,usually an itinerant figure romanticized in popularsongs, prints and even porcelain, travelled fromvillage to village with his apparatus and was afavourite attraction at fairs and festivals.15 His peep-show pictures of exotic places, historic events andmonuments were usually accompanied by a spokennarration. Audiences gathered around a large box andfor a small price would view the printed scenes thatcould be changed by an internal mechanism. By theearly nineteenth century, the elaborate boxes hadgiven way to inexpensive smaller devices that wereintended for the individual, bourgeois, viewer.16 Thepolyorama panoptique, for example, was a woodenbox with paper bellows; miniature panoramas werealso related to this type of device.17 Peep eggs, madeof alabaster, were even smaller and more portable.18

The most common form of nineteenth-centurypeepshow was made of flexible folding paper orlinen bellows with lithographed or engraved, andoften hand-coloured, scenes placed in succession togive the visual effect of receding space. Although it isimpossible to know how many were published, theywere common, and inexpensive, if not cheap.19 Thisgenre could be stored flattened and, importantly, nolonger required a showman to operate. Instead, itcould be held by the individual or placed on a table,offering an intimate viewing in the privacy of one'sown home.

Jonathan Crary has argued for the historical speci-ficity of vision in the production of the observer.Tracing the rise of optical devices such as thephenakistiscope, kaleidoscope and stereoscope inthe early nineteenth century, Crary shows howscientific experiments employed some of the sametechniques of popular optical diversions.20 Althoughall kinds of devices flourished with the nineteenth-century delight in visual entertainment, the paperpeepshow did not share the mechanical complexityof many of its contemporaries. The peepshow,moreover, did not have a counterpart in nine-teenth-century empirical science but rather emergedfrom an older tradition of printed scenic views prizedby eighteenth-century antiquarians. The bourgeoispeepshow observer who looked into the miniatur-ized fair buildings—which housed an encyclopedicarray of products and oddities—inherited the per-spective of the collector and a legacy of viewingcities or scenes like objects in a kunstkatnmer.

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Viewing Souvenirs: Peepshows and the International Expositions

The nineteenth-century paper peepshow was notthe public attraction that the travelling peepshow hadonce been, but it maintained associations with fairsand festivals and the subjects depicted continued to belarge scale. Monuments of engineering, such asbridges and tunnels and the large buildings erectedfor world's fairs, were miniaturized for Victoriantourists in a series of paper planes. A favouritetheme for paper peepshows of the 1830s and 1840s,for example, was Marc and Isambard Brunei'sThames Tunnel, which was inaugurated in 1843,and continually celebrated with an annual fair tocommemorate its opening [I].21 Peering through

the peepholes, a viewer could join the crowd ofother tourists depicted in the deeply receding spaceof the two pedestrian tunnels that were lit by gas.This shift, then, towards the inexpensive privateapparatus coincided precisely with the public valor-ization of monumental industrial structures. Yet inpeepshow representations, the spectator's relationshipto the gigantic building is inverted; a feat of modernindustrial technology is transformed into anenchanted miniature world. As a souvenir, the peep-show is not only a commodity, but it also allows thephysical experience of the space to dissolve into anidealized, dreamlike memory.

Fig 1. A Perspective View of the Thames

Tunnel; History of the Thames Tunnel,

Azulay, London, c. 1844

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The Great ExhibitionThe Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of AllNations, or the Crystal Palace Exhibition, in 1851stimulated a new spate of "paper views'. Publishedunder the names of 'telescopic view' or 'perspectiveview', these devices ordered the gaze to conform tothe broad vistas that the Crystal Palace, erected inHyde Park in central London, itself offered to visitors.Like the Thames Tunnel, Notre Dame de Paris, SaintPaul's Cathedral and other structures depicted inpeepshow formats, the Crystal Palace's form lentitself to the impression of infinite recession.22 Thelarge iron-and-glass structure, designed by JosephPaxton, was built on a cruciform plan. Under thelong barrel-vaulted roof that enclosed several elmtrees, visitors encountered a magical crystallinespace. Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, intheir story of the Sandboys family and their trip to theGreat Exhibition, commented:

the very name of the Crystal Palace had led people toconjure up in their minds a phantasm that could not berealized . . . Then to stand in the centre of the huge crys-tal pile, and cast the eye thence in any direction, wasindeed to behold a sight that had no parallel in excel-lence. The exquisite lightness and tone of color that per-vaded the entire structure was a visual feast, and a raredelight of air, colour, and space.23

The association between the building and a 'phant-asm' or 'fairy tale' palace, words that were widelyrepeated at the time, suggests that the spectacularvisual effects were owed in part to a romantic imagethat visitors anticipated.24 Representations of theCrystal Palace reinforced this perception of enchant-ment. Many exterior views depicted the luminousqualities of the structure and its large size, which wasparticularly apparent when viewed from a distance.25

The interior was rendered equally marvellous inviews that emphasized the building's scale, fragilityand exotic colour. Benjamin himself remarked thatthe watercolour representations of the Crystal Palacedepicted 'how the exhibitors took pains to decoratethe colossal interior in an oriental-fairy-tale style'.26

In the peepshow memento, the three-dimensionalillusion and modulated light further animated theinterior world of the exhibition.

Precise lithographic printing and careful hand-coloured embellishment cause the successively

arranged cards to appear as a three-dimensionalscene when viewed through the peephole. Carefulobservation, meticulous rendering and clever con-struction project an impression of spectral authenti-city. An example designed by T. J. Rawlins, andpublished by C. A. Lane in London, reveals the visualeffect of Paxton's girders, and Owen Jones's colourscheme, disappearing into the distance.27 A view ofthe central aisle shows the presence of the Queen,under her canopy on opening day, cut out in themiddle ground. Rawlins also includes the crowdcrushed against the brightly coloured goods installedin the balconies. And, in another, there are glassfragments applied to the image of the glass 'crystal'fountain, which when viewed with oblique lightwould suggest the glistening appearance, 'as if it hadbeen carved out of icicles', which Mayhew andCruikshank had observed.28 On the top card, in anaffectionate hommagc, Rawlins includes a peepshowman—dressed in the royal standard—who pulls asidethe curtain (revealing the peephole) for the figuresgathered in the foreground [2]. The expositionbuilding is shown in a pale outline, as if located farfrom the observers. By contrast, the interior of thestructure, seen through the hole, is vivid and lifelike.The disjunctive visual relationship between the exter-ior and interior underscored the way memory itselfoperated. At once elusive and immediate, the experi-ence of seeing—and remembering—transformedimages of the exhibition into a haunting phantasma-goria.

Many peepshows were designed so that the viewthrough the peepholes approximated the perspectiveof a visitor to the exhibition. In a peepshowassembled as a series of freestanding cards, forinstance, the top card shows the exterior of theCrystal Palace as a massive presence on the horizondwarfing the tiny figures below [3]. Through each ofthe five holes that puncture this image, one can seesimilar figures depicted •wandering down the sideaisles, the central nave or the balconies. Renderedin a peepshow format, the ethereal form and effect ofthe building's interior is portrayed as a dazzlinguniverse that encompasses the products of the world'smanufacture. These views, like the fairs themselves,reinforce a particular way of understanding what wasseen. Looking down the vaulted space, layers ofgoods and activities occupy the optical field; theexaggerated perspective gives the sublime sensation

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Fig 2. Telescopic View of the GreatExhibition of 1851, C. Moody, London,£.1851

of bewildering height, orderly crowds and endlessdisplays of things.

For Benjamin, the commodities at world's fairs,displayed on pedestals and in glass structures, wereexhibited not only as the fetishized objects of indus-trial capitalism, but also as a shimmering representa-tion of burgeoning consumer desire. Although thegoods on display at international fairs were exhibitedto stimulate consumption, few items were actually forsale. Benjamin commented that 'the world exhibi-tions were training schools in which the masses,barred from consuming, learned empathy withexchange value. "Look at everything; touch noth-ing." >29 The deliberately elaborate exhibition pieces,working machines and raw materials that were dis-played conveyed the abstract potential of the com-modity. The transformation of commodities frombanal goods to high spectacle, which ThomasRichards argues took root as a principal lesson ofthe Great Exhibition, was confirmed within die con-text of a fundamental shift in viewing that favouredme phantasmagorical. He comments that 'at the GreatExhibition anything that interferes with die directperception of manufactured objects has conveniendyfallen away; there is a contraction of perception as thesubject becomes the exclusive consumer of material

objects.'30 While visual consumption was the exerciseof the exposition, a commodity culture also flourishedin the form of souvenirs and sentimental objects.31

Representations of the buildings, attractions and eventhe experience of looking was commemorated, man-ufactured and sold in the form of goods such asalbums, prints, fans and toys.

Souvenir viewsAs the nexus between expositions and tourism wasestablished in die nineteenth and twentiedi cen-turies, entrepreneurs, publishers and departmentstores provided all types of souvenir maps, guide-books and objects for the home that commemorateddie experience of attending an exhibition, in stockviews of die major attractions. Collectible souvenirimages of single buildings and scenic views wereavailable already for eighteenth-century tourists.Travellers on die Grand Tour habitually assembledcollections of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's vedute ofdie monuments of ancient Rome to take back totheir libraries. Representations of important sites canalso be found in other forms. A matching suite ofjewellery from about 1810 shows how the edificesof Rome were depicted in tiny mosaic chips for

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Fig 3 . Exposition de Londres, London Exhibition

display on the body [4]. Nineteenth-century world'sfair souvenirs followed in this tradition, objectifyingthe buildings erected for die fairs onto incongruousproducts such as scarves, fans and plates. Manyexamples showed die fair buildings, such as dieCrystal Palace or die Palais de l'Industrie from1855 [5], in perspective. The gigantism of diestructure, depicted in perspective to enhance itssize, is necessarily inverted to fit onto die surfaceof die fan, yet die disjunction between die immensefacades and die products of personal adornmentshows how die ephemeral souvenir existed in acontinual discourse with die monumental.

The huge scale of die international exposition,viewed from an omniscient perspective, was a favour-ite dieme for nineteendi-century souvenirs. Like die

panorama, die grand, seemingly endless, view was alsoclosely associated widi the world's fairs.32 In 1867,Nadar took his famous photographic views of die cityof Paris from a balloon high above die circularexposition building. A French peepshow from diisexhibition also offers a variation on diis panoramicperspective of die exterior and die interior [6].Indeed, visitors came to world's fairs to look at bodigoods and vistas. By 1889, when visitors ascended dieEiffel Tower to look down on die city of Paris,viewing the exposition from above had become aquintessential experience of fair tourism. A guidebookcommented on diis particular scene:

The exhibition with its marvellous palaces and pavilions,its gardens and terraces, is seen to the greatest advantage,

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Fig 4. Parurt with Views of Ancient Monuments of Rome, c.1810

and produces an effect of confused architectural magnifi-cence never to be forgotten, recalling in many ways oneof those fantastical panoramas conjured up by the vividimagination of Martin in his extraordinary pictures ofancient Babylon, Rome and Jerusalem . . . Hie nightpanorama from the Eiffel tower is even more wonderfulthan that to be seen by daylight.33

Likened to a panorama, the real view has come toapproximate the artful manipulation of the spectacle.

Moreover, the 'confused architectural magnificence'could be easily simulated in souvenir versions con-structed of folding paper planes.

The impression of confusion, which one might haveobserved from a vantage point high in the air, couldalso be represented in three-dimensional moveablesouvenirs. A pop-up from the World's ColumbianExposition in Chicago in 1893 shows the Administra-tion Building, the Machinery Hall and Illinois Building

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Fig 5. Souvenir Fan with Views of 185 5 Paris International Exposition

in a carefully arranged composition, but one thatwould actually have been impossible to see on thelevel topography of the Chicago site [7]. The pictur-esque grouping of facades, depicted in perspective, isset into a receding space that piles them on top of eachother. This assembly of monuments, then, turns thefair buildings into a collection of objects removed fromtheir physical context on the south shore of LakeMichigan. The souvenir, as Susan Stewart hasargued, is necessarily fragmentary.34 Like other souve-nirs, too, the paper peepshow and pop-up souvenirsthat were made for world's fairs operate metonymi-cally. That is, they offer a singular, fragmentary, view-point that stands for the whole experience of attendingan international exposition. By experiencing thegigantic structures as miniature environments, theviewer becomes all-powerful, and the buildingsbecome portable mementoes. The process of minia-turization renders the abstract visual experience into aneatly collectible commodity. Thus, while Benjaminargued that 'possession and having are allied with dietactile, and stand in a certain opposition to the optical',the optical souvenir transcends, and even subsumes,the experience of the mobile observer or flaneur?*Aldiough peepshows privilege the experience ofsight, they were produced as objects for purchase. In

this sense, we can see the concept of the phantasma-goria most clearly at work—for the peepshow souveniris at once the commodity itself and an illusory opticalexperience that the commodity generates, and thatgenerates desire for the commodity.

Illustrated catalogues, lithographed albums andmaps were among other souvenirs that were createdfor exposition tourism. Like the lavish lithographedportfolios produced to commemorate the fairs, thepaper peepshow ensured that viewing the temporaryexhibition would continue indefinitely.36 The effectof the peepshow, however, set it apart from othersouvenirs such as fans or leather-bound albums. Themulti-volume catalogues and commemorativealbums from 1851 and after were not only unwieldyin size, but the survey of the objects and installationswas revealed only as each page turned, and could notfix the impression as a singular, spectacular experi-ence. By contrast, peepshows isolated the viewer anddirected the gaze towards the interiors of individualbuildings and, by extension, upon individual, sub-jective experience itself. Moreover, while albums andcatalogues gave exacting details about the individualobjects, manufactured goods and national displays,the peepshow eschewed specificity in favour of theoverall visual impression.

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': INTERNATIONAL ^EXHIBITION'UNIVERSELU at t&§7, PARI

•::;E UNIVBREALE

:i UNIVERSAL

Fig 6. Optical Theater of the Exposition Universellc, Pans, ISbT

What distinguishes world's fair peepshows fromthe myriad of other souvenirs produced for theinternational fairs is that die act of looking, the verypremise of expositions, is thematized. Tony Bennetthas suggested that the 'exhibitionary complex' holdsthe power to open up the confines of knowledge and,in the case of the world's fair, to turn the dynamics ofviewing back in on itself37 The Crystal Palace offeredmany places for looking and places for viewers toobserve others. As a result, Bennett argues, the crowditself became a self-regulating spectacle on display.Bennett's emphasis on the social effect of the visualexperience of space in international exhibitions seemsborne out by the proliferation of inexpensive opticalsouvenirs such as paper peepshows that rendered thecrowd in separate planes, producing an appearance ofcasual, unthreatening, disorder. Peering through the

peephole into the world of the fair, the viewer wasgiven an idealized impression of both die visualeffects and social dynamics. Furthermore, the impres-sion of the world collapsed into a miniature, bour-geois version of itself, for the fair was heightened andinverted as it was further reduced in the peepshow.Positioned on the outside looking in, the viewer—once an object on display along with the othercommodities—trained a gaze on die world withphantom objectivity.

As a popular optical amusement, die peepshowflourished alongside die diorama, die panorama anddie magic lantern, all of which reached die height oftheir popularity in die first half of die nineteendicentury. While die panorama and the magic lanterntraded on dieir ability to project an unfetteredillusion, die peepshow with its perspective view

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Fig 7. Scenographk \riew ofthe World's ColumbianExposition, 1893

also offered a manipulated vision that seemed to recedenaturalisticaUy. However, the sequential, theatrical,arrangement of cards and viewing hole made thepeepshow a static, monocular, viewing device.38

Jonathan Crary suggests that the all-encompassing,'realistic' vision of the world, of which he argues thebinocular stereoscope is symptomatic, became thedominant mode from the 1830s onwards. Just as thestereoscope afforded objects in the middle ground ananimated appearance, the peepshow souvenir placedthe gaze squarely on the goods and parts of thebuilding that occupied the middle field. The peep-show dream world offered up in paper and ink,however, could not approximate the 'realism' andmechanical complexity of the stereoscope. BrittSalveson observes that the souvenir stereoscopicviews that became popular during the 1862 exhibi-

tion in London began to supplant the engraved orlithographic image because they were inexpensive,portable and especially because they allowed theviewer a more lifelike and vicarious experience ofexhibition attractions.39 The taste for souvenirsparalleled this desire for visual immediacy, buteven when the peepshow fonnat shifted to a foldingpop-up without a peephole in the late nineteenthcentury, this technique of viewing was traditionallyscenic. Just as the paper peepshow was eclipsed bynewer technologies of viewing, even sophisticatedinventions such as the stereoscope, Crary argues,waned in the second half of the nineteenth centuryas spectators craved the 'phantasmagoric' effect thatits machine-like technology compromised, butwhich became increasingly accessible in the formof photography.140

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Viewing Souvenirs: Peepshows and the Internationa] Expositions

The desire for phantasmagoric illusion ran parallelwith the age of the international expositions. And it isin this context that the peepshow souvenir flourishedas an inexpensive commodity that opened up amagical world of visual experience. The simpleapparatus of extending paper cards offered a perspect-ive diat rendered the entire exhibition into a spatialphantasmagoria that dissolved boundaries betweenpast and present. But as the taste for 'realistic'photographic images of the exhibitions increased,the optical games of peepshows were deemed appro-priate as entertainment for children/1

The association with children has relegated peep-shows to the margins of the history of visual culture.A historian writing in the 1940s remarked that afterthe eighteenth century the peepshow '. . . deterior-ated. From the status of a scientific toy made tominister the curiosity of die educated wealthy, itsank to the level of . . . children's entertainment."42

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints, however,show bodi adults and children peering into boxes.And, as Barbara Stafford has suggested, early modemoptical amusements were intended for a lifetime oflearning.43 The experience of looking into a devicethat held a magical world in miniature opened uppossibilities for apprehending both die physicalaspects of die natural world and die power of theimagination. As Benjamin observed, peepshows, aswell as dioramas and panoramas, 'lead die observereven more deeply into the mysteries of the world ofplay than do marionettes.'44 It is precisely diis associa-tion with dreamlike fantasy diat Benjamin saw oper-ating as phantasmagoria in die experience of dieexposition.

Souvenirs, memory, timeThe elusive relationship between real experience andmemory is the conundrum of die souvenir. As SusanStewart suggests, 'die double function of the souveniris to authenticate a past or odierwise remote experi-ence and, at the same time, to discredit the present.'45

World's fairs, if they celebrated contemporaryachievements and endlessly imagined a future thatimproved on the present, also represented the past asan object of longing. Historical surveys mounted forexhibitions were an important means of suggestingmaterial and social progress. The exhibition of diehistory of work in 1867 or Charles Garnier's highly

interpretative history of habitation in 1889 aimed atshowing the superiority of modern (or European)practices over diose of the past. At the same time,however, important edifices of die past became astandard feature at international expositions wherethey were reverentially displayed. At die CentennialExhibition in 1876, for example, an American logcabin was erected and stocked widi items of daily lifefrom the colonial era. Similarly, die Bastille wasreconstructed in wood and plaster at die ExpositionUniverselle in 1889. Small picturesque 'villages' basedon medieval Brussels (1897), Paris (1900), Liege(1905), Merrie England and Old New York (1939)were theatrically produced and enacted to die delightof fairgoers. Miniaturized for die amusement ofviewers, these attractions relied upon a collectivenostalgia that sought relief in a romantic, seeminglytimeless, vision of the past.

The visual experience of die peepshow, and itsmeaning as a souvenir, is also implicated in thisdiscourse of nostalgia. A viewer looking throughdie peephole can experience die fair as an event inbodi die past and die present. Representations ofbuildings were often surrounded widi strolling fig-ures. The inclusion of diese surrogate viewers whoseexperience of die exhibition never ceases reinforcesdie impression of timelessness. All souvenirs facilitatethis temporal 'privatization' of history, but die appar-atus of die peepshow, which concentrates die visualsense on an arrangement of cards, heightens dieperception of space transcending time.46 Throughdie peephole, even specific events, moments ordates become subsumed into an illusory world. Thepeepshow souvenir, moreover, was closely identifiedwith the tradition of the international exhibitions.When it was revived as a souvenir for die 1939 NewYork World's Fair, the peepshow seemed to sum updie complex experience of the exhibitions as firmlypart of a history of historical events and as a statementof confidence in die present.

Just as the nationalistic micro-villages were stagedto amuse, so the continuum of time could also berepresented spatially in die peepshow format. Theexample from the New York World's Fair in 1939,designed by die illustrators Warren Chappell andElizabeth Sage Hare, anachronistically takes dieform of a nineteendi-century paper peepshow [8].Unlike nineteenth-century views, however, the 1939example is not conceived as 'timeless', but self-

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Fig 8. The World of Tomorrow, 1939

consciously devised to represent rime itself. A jester sitsin as the peepshow man, offering the view to twoeighteenth-century figures, George and MarthaWashington. Gazing through the peephole, into 'theworld of tomorrow' (the fair's motto), these viewersencounter the image of the future. At the end of thevista, past the giant statue of Washington, and standingas the culmination of human endeavour are themassive structures of the Trylon and Perispherethat were the fair's emblems. This peepshow notonly represented the buildings erected for the 1939fair and the experience of looking down the formalpar-terre of Constitution Mall. It also represented invisual terms the continuum of 150 years, from thetime when Washington was inaugurated as the firstPresident of the United States until 1939. In thecontext of the end of the Great Depression, lookingback to the end of the eighteenth century was surely astrategy of reassurance. In this example, the peepshowdirects the gaze from the past towards the future; itkeeps the trajectory of nostalgia flowing in thedirection of hope and progress, obscuring mundanedetails or the profound uncertainties of Americanhistory. In the peepshow phantasmagoria, the fair isa glorious celebration of its own mythic culture, andmemories nourished on souvenir imagery take on thereductive, self-congratulatory message of the fair itself.

As scholars have suggested, the emphasis on visual-ity at world's fairs is profoundly ideological.47 The

perception of vision as a transparent sense wasemployed as a means of persuasion at all fairs.When G. Brown Goode devised the motto 'to seeis to know' for the World's Columbian Exposition in1893, the primacy of viewing was already closelyassociated with expositions.48 The peepshow is evid-ence not only of the intensely visual popular cultureof world's fairs, but also of the carefully constructedrelationship between spectators, expositions andmemory. As documents of the culture of visualityand spectacle that emerged in the nineteenth century,peepshow souvenirs suggest the selective visualexperience that exposition organizers, architects,draughtsmen, publishers and entrepreneurs deter-mined. Moreover, as representations of architecturalspace, world's fair peepshows demonstrate how min-iaturization became an essential strategy in renderingthe fair both consumable and memorable. As sou-venirs of viewing, peepshows also exemplify Benja-min's observations on the effects of capitalism. If theinternational exposition miniaturized the globe anddisplayed it to viewers as a phantasmagoria, peep-shows offered up a most apt souvenir of this visualexperience. At the fair, spectators learned to consumethe carefully ordered information as amusement,through a scrim of the phantasmagoria; gazing on itagain through a peephole affirmed the lesson. Whilepeepshows suggest a carefully manipulated view ofthe experience of the exposition, they also show how

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looking and the act of visual consumption can presenta broader vista into the study of culture.

Amy F. OgataThe Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Aro,Design, and Culture

NotesThis originated as a paper presented to the Popular CultureAssociation/American Culture Association at their annual meetingin Philadelphia in 2001. My thanks are due to those who attendedthat session, to the students in my course on world's feus, and toJames Goldwasser, Elizabeth J. Moodey, Peter N. Miller, FrancesTerpak and Jeremy Aynsley.

1 J. All wood. The Story of Exhibitions, Cassell & Collier Mac-millan, 1977; P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The ExpositionsUmverseOes, Grtat Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939,Manchester University Press, 1988; R. RydelL All the WoHd's aFair, University of Chicago Press, 1984; World of Fairs: TheCentury-of-Progress Expositions, University of Chicago Press,1993; J. Auerbach, The Grtat Exhibition of 1851: A Nation onDisplay, Yale University Press, 1999.

2 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland &K. McLaughlin, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press,1999, p. 18.

3 T. Richards, Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertisingand Spectacle 1851-1914, Stanford University Press, 1990;R_ Williams, Dream Worlds, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cali-fornia, 1982.

4 Auerbach discusses the relationship between the various indus-tries involved in providing excursion travel to see die GreatExhibition. See Auerbach, op. cit , pp. 137—44.

5 Rolf Tiedemann describes Benjamin's phantasmagoria as 'ABlendwerk, a deceptive image designed to dazzle, is already mecommodity itself, in which the exchange value or value-formhides the use value. Phantasmagoria is me whole capitalistproduction process, which constitutes itself as a natural forceagainst die people who carry it out.' See Tiedemann, "Dialecticsat a standstill: approaches to the Passagen-Werk', in G. Smith,(ed.), On Walter Benjamin, MIT Press, 1988, pp. 276-7.

6 S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, MIT Press, 1989, p. 81.

7 B. Stafford & F. Terpak, Devices of Wonder, Getty ResearchInstitute, 2001, pp. 81-90; 297-306; J. Crary, Techniques of theObserver, MIT Press, 1990, pp. 132-3; T. Castle, 'Phantasma-goria: spectral technology and the metaphorics of modemreverie', Critical Inquiry, no. 15, Autumn 1988, pp. 26—61.

8 Castle, op. cit., pp. 30-1 .

9 T. Adomo, In Search of Wagner, trans. R- Livingstone, Verso,1991, p. 90; A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, Indiana, 1986,pp. 39-40.

10 The term 'peepshow' is used to describe many differentdevices, including me seventeenth-century Dutch boxesemployed by artists such as Samuel van Hoogstraaten. SeeD. Bomford, 'Perspective, anamorphosis and illusion: seven-teenm-century Dutch peepshows', Studies in the History of Art,no. 55, 1998, pp. 124-35.

11 For a history of peepshows, see R. Balzer, Peepshows: A VisualHistory, Abrams, 1998.

12 B. Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightment Entertainment and theEdspse of Visual Education, MIT Press, 1994.

13 Stafford & Terpak, op. cit., pp. 106-7, 338; W. Bom, 'Earlypeep shows and me Renaissance stage', Connoisseur, no. 107,February 1941, pp. 67-71, 161-4; Baker, op. cit., p. 18.

14 In English, they were called peepshows or raree shows, inGerman Guckkasten, nek in Russian, and in French vuesd'optique. See, for example, A. Steinmetz-Oppelland, 'EineWeltreise mit den Augen: Guckkajtenbilder des 18 und friihe19 Jahrhunderts', Wettkunst, voL 66, no. 2, 1996, pp. 133-5;U. Becker, 'Spielgelwdten-WeltenspiegeT, Weltkunst, vol. 63,no. 18, 1993, p. 2376; C. Kelly, 'Territories of the eye: theRussian peep show (Raek) and pre-Revolutionary visual cul-ture', Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 31, no. 4, 1998, pp. 49—74;Les Vues d'optiques: Collection Muste Niepce, Chalon-sur-Saone,Musee Nicephore Niepce, 1993; A. Milano (ed.), Viaggio inEuropa attmverso le vues d'optique, Mazzotta, 1990.

15 F. Howe, 'Early American movies: peep shows and peep-showprints', The Magazine Antiques, vol. 24, September 1933, p. 99.

16 J. Barnes, Precursors of the Cinema, Catalogue of the Collection, Part I,Barnes Museum of Cinematography, Saint Ives, 1967, p. 59.

17 Balzer, op. cit , p. 39.

18 A. Fraser, A History of Toys, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966,p. 128. Fraser notes that common memes included die CliftonSuspension Bridge and Nightingale Valley, and Noah's Ark.

19 Very little is known about the production of these objects. Likemeir eighteendi-century ancestors, nineteenth-century peep-shows were published in England, France and Germany. Theywere, however, much less precious dian the model theatres ofthe eighteenth century. An example of the Thames Tunnelfrom 1828 cost rhree shillings, which would have been worthabout 2s.3d. in 1851, nearly the same cost as a worker's entryfee to die exhibition in August.

20 Crary, op. cit , p. 112.

21 A Perspective View of the Thames and the Thames Tunnel; History ofthe Thames Tunnel, Azulay, London, c 1844. There were manyothers published in England, France and Germany between1824 and at least 1844.

22 Dean's New Magic Peepshow Picture Book, Dean & Son, c 1859,claimed that it showed 'wonderful and lifelike effects of realdistance and space'.

23 H. Mayhew & G. Cruikshank, 1851: The Adventures of Mr. AndMrs. Sandboys, Their Son and Daughter, Who came up to London toEnjoy Themselves and to See the Great Exhibition, Stringer &Towraend, New York, 1851, p. 134.

24 Queen Victoria herself described the building as 'incrediblyglorious, really like fairyland'. See J. McKean, Crystal Palace:Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox, Phaidon, 1994. Benjamin alsocites Julius Lessing and Lothar Bucher's impressions of theCrystal Palace in me Arcades Project Benjamin, op. cit , p. 184.

25 Thomas Richards argua diat the most popular representationsof me Crystal Palace depicted io exterior as opaque, likening itto 'a gigantic glass case'. Pictures of the interior were, however,quite common and equally made use of the beD jar imagery. SeeRichards, op. cit , p. 23.

26 Benjamin, op. cit , p. 176.

27 Rawlins, a watercolourijt and illustrator, was active in Britainbetween 1837 and 1860; see S. Houfe, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, Antique Col-lectors' Club, 1996.

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28 Mayhew & Cruikshank, op. ciL, p. 134.

29 Benjamin, op. cit., p. 201.

30 Richards, p. 64.

31 This seems to apply to the early national tain as well. Thespecial collections division at the Getty Research Institute forthe History of Art and the Humanities has a peepshow from theParis exposiDon of 1844.

32 There were panoramas exhibited at the world's fain of 1855,1889 and 1900. See S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of aMass Medium, trans. D. Schneider, Zone Books, 1997, pp. 171—83, 221-3; B. Comment, The Painted Panorama, HarryN. Abrams, 1999.

33 Cited in D. MacCannell, The Tourist, rev. edn., University ofCalifornia Press, 1999, p. 122.

34 S. Stewart, On Longing, Duke University Press, 1993 (paper),pp. 136-8.

35 Benjamin, op. CIL, p. 206.

36 See the folio editions such as Dickinson's Comprehensive Picturesof the Great Exhibition of 1851, Dickinson Brothers, 1854 andTalhs's History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and theExhibition of the World's Industry in 1851, 3 vob., John TalHs& Co, 1852.

37 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics,Routledge, 1994, pp. 59-88.

38 Even in examples where theTe are multiple peepholes, they areintended to be viewed with one eye.

39 B. Salveson, '"The Most Magnificent, Useful and InterestingSouvenir": representations of the International Exhibition of1862', Visual Resources, vol. 13, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-32.

40 Crary, op. cit., p. 132.

41 Children were always, of course, potential viewers of peep-shows. There is evidence mat peepshows were given to children;however, they were not perhaps purchased expressly for them.An example of the Thames Tunnel from the early nineteenthcentury in the Dibner Collection at the Smithsonian Institutioncarries the inscription: 'Given to A. B. Tebbs Febr. 10th 1884 atage of 6 by Grandmar Ridley.' In the eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century toy theatres, printed devices similar to peep-shows, were snipped out and constructed by children as at-homediversions. See Stafford & Terpak, op. cit., p. 105, and KennethFawdry (ed.), Toy Theatre, Pollock's Toy Theatres, 1980. In thetwentieth century, peepshow books were, however, designedspecifically for the amusement of children. Lesley Gordon,Peepshow into Paradise, John DeGrafF, 1953, pp. 216-21.

42 Bom, op. cit., p. 180.

43 Stafford, op. cit., pp. 58, 288

44 W. Benjamin, 'Old toys', in M.Jennings, H. Eiland & G. Smith(eds.), Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, vol. 2, Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 1999, pp. 99-100.

45 Stewart, op. cit., p. 139.

46 Ibid., p. 138.

47 Bennett, op. cit., pp. 60-9; C. Hinsley, "The wodd as market-place: commodification of the exotic at the World's ColumbianExposition, Chicago, 1893', in I. Karp & S. D. Lavine (eds.),Exhibiting Cultures, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991;J. Herbert, 'The view of the Trocadero: the real subject ofthe Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937', Assemblage, vol. 26,April 1995, pp. 94-112.

48 Rydell, op. cit., p. 44.

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