One way a person in London might learn about the world was to peruse scenes in the technological wonder called the Cosmorama. Located at 207-209 Regent Street, the
public could view scenes of distant lands and exotic subjects through optical
devices that magnified the pictures in its many rooms.
A new take on the street peep show, the Cosmorama focused on oddities painted on miniature canvases.
The Shows of London by Richard Daniel Altick tells us: “a high-toned indoor version of the old peepshow. The first London exhibition with this title opened in 1820 in St. James’ Street, but the premises proving unsuitable, it moved in May 1823 to 209 Regent Street, where adequate natural lighting was available. Here the “Cosmorama Rooms,” lie the future Royal Bazaar in Oxford Street and similar exhibition halls elsewhere, served as a fashionable meeting place where, in addition to the advertised shows, paintings and other objects of art were offered for sale and light refreshments were available for those who chose to drop in an idle away an hour or so in casually inspecting whatever was on display and gossiping with acquaintances. Let into each of two facing walls in the salon was a row of seven glasses which were in fact large convex lenses. Behind each lens was a small picture whose size and distance from the viewer the lens magnified…The Cosmorama…commissioned respectable little oil paintings—panoramas writ small. To produxe the illusion of a separate reality, a black frame, the equivalent of the Diorama’s dark tunnel, was interposed between the lens and the picture. Various perspective effects were cretted through mirrors.”
“Intially it had a mixed press. To some papers it seemed the height of pretentiousness, this array of fourteen peepshows set up in a room whose appointments were designed to attract the patronage of what the advertisements addressed as the “Cosmopolite Society.” Entry was one shilling (street peepshows were a penny or less).
