Introduction: A popular new paper toy

During the 1820s and 1830s in England, S. F. Gouyn's A View of the Tunnel under the Thames must have been familiar to many. Collapsed flat, it measures slightly larger than a piece of A6-size paper. Encompassed by a pink border, the front-face carries an oval vignette of the Thames Tunnel under construction, although the title promises a view of this subterranean passage in its future finished state on the inside (Fig. 9.1.). As we lift the frontface, the vignette, which turns out to be two shutters covering a peephole, retracts, revealing five cut-out panels and a backboard lining up one behind another, connected by paper bellows. Looking through the peephole, we see miniature figures, carriages, and carts promenading through the bright archways under the Thames (Fig. 9.2.).

Gouyn's work is an example of a type of optical toy that was first produced in England by S. & J. Fuller in London in 1825 and which also emerged on the market in Austria, France, and Germany around the same time. This optical toy was not given a general name in the nineteenth century, and it was only by the beginning of the twentieth century that collectors and scholars started to label it under various broad terms, one of which is “paper peepshow,” the phrase adopted in this chapter.