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A View of the Tunnel
under the Thames, as it will Appear When Completed (London: S. E. Gouyn, 1828)
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Perspective view, peepshow, and tunnel book are all words
that have been used to describe our recent acquisition A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as it will Appear When
Completed. (London: S. E. Gouyn,
1828). The enchanting optical device purchased with funds from our Visual
Culture Program represents the long and complicated history of the interrelationship
of the study of optics with popular culture.
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Front view of extended tunnel book A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as it will Appear When Completed
(London: S. E. Gouyn, 1828).
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Collector and scholar Richard Balzer
dates peepshows’/tunnel books’ beginnings to around the 15th century in Europe
when box-like devices with peepholes were created to learn about the mechanics
of vision. The instruments, often used by Renaissance artists to recreate
perspective, became primarily associated with the itinerant showman by the 18th
century. Later in the century peepshows entered the parlors of the affluent as the
perspective box in which a set of prints was arranged to create a three-dimensional
view designed to entertain the eye and mind. By the 1820s peepshows more
closely resembling the subject of this essay became items of more general
consumption when professionally printed and assembled for introduction into the
market as souvenirs. A channel being
constructed under the Thames River made the ideal subject for an optical device
that created a “tunnel” perspective.
The start of the construction in 1825 of the Thames Tunnel,
the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” made international news. On August 23, 1825, the Philadelphia
newspaper the National Gazette wrote about
the underground tunnel that would connect the
opposite banks of the Thames River for commercial purposes as “the
commencement of [a] novel undertaking, which will be read with interest.” Constructed
after the revolutionary designs of Marc Brunel (1769-1849), the novel
undertaking led not only to persons reading about it with interest but to the
production of novelties. From the onset of construction and despite floods and
collapses in the 1820s and 1830s, visitors flocked to see the tunnel.
Merchandise vendors selling all manner of souvenirs, including peepshows, quickly
followed. The engineering feat spurred publishers to issue over fifty different
designs of Thames Tunnel peepshows between 1825 and the early 1860s. No other
subject comprised as many of them. By probable consequence, the contemporary term
“tunnel book” soon thereafter superseded “peepshow” in our lexicon for these
devices.
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Interior view of tunnel book A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as it will Appear When Completed
(London: S. E. Gouyn, 1828).
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The first Thames Tunnel peepshow issued in 1825 by London
publisher T. Brown served as the model for the graphic design of the devices,
including S. E. Gouyn’s, through the 1830s. Comprised of the imagined Eastern
and Western archways, a look through the book’s peephole reveals pedestrian and
vehicular traffic, including men on horseback, carriages, and horse-drawn
wagons. A prime article for the transatlantic book trade, our newly-acquired
peepshow may likely be the “perspective view of the tunnel under the Thames”
advertised in the New York newspaper American
in April 1828 by New York publishers and print sellers Behr & Kahl. However, once the tunnel officially opened to only
pedestrian traffic in 1843, the design evolved. Vehicular traffic no longer appeared.
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| Handmade tunnel book showing an enclosed thoroughfare (United States?, ca. 1850). |
This change in design provides further clues to better
understand a circa 1850 “homemade” tunnel book added to our collections in
2011. The similarities in the graphics depicting the interiors of the tunnels
of Gouyn’s and our 2011 acquisition, particularly the style of a covered wagon,
lends credence to our conjecture that the earlier acquired piece is modeled
after a Thames Tunnel book, probably issued before 1843.
After 1843 and through the 1850s, “perspective view
manufacturer” Bondy Azulay (b. 1813) became the primary manufacturer of these Thames
Tunnel novelties. His manufacturing of
the devices proved a more crude construction than earlier ones. His books also often
included two to three peepholes on the front board. The design provided views
of the tunnel traffic, as well as the river. Although the Library does not hold
a Thames Tunnel book published by Azulay, we do hold his complementary 1851 eighteen-foot
long Grand
Panorama of London and the River Thames.
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| Oblique view of extended tunnel book A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as it will Appear When Completed (London: S. E. Gouyn, 1828). |
By the early 1860s Azulay ceased to manufacture Thames
Tunnel books. In 1865 the East London Railway Company purchased the tunnel. Pedestrian
traffic halted and the tunnel became a part of the railway. Nonetheless, the
“novel undertaking” of the Thames Tunnel still endures as novel. The numerous tunnel
books created in its image continue to serve as novelties rich for the study of
Trans-Atlantic visual culture during the Victorian era.
Erika Piola
Associate Curator, Prints and Photographs
Co-Director, VCP at LCP
Sources:
American, April 3,
1828
Richard Balzer, Peepshows:
A Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998)
Ralph Hyde, Paper
Peepshows: The Jaqueline and Jonathan Gestetner Collection (Woodbridge,
Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015)
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