New Book on Ninteenth-Century Visual Shows

Popular Visual Shows 1800–1914: Picturegoing from Peep Shows to Film
by Joe Kember and John Plunkett
Oxford University Press
2025

Popular Visual Shows 1800–1914: Picturegoing from Peepshows to Film tells the story of the growth of picturegoing as a popular habit in Britain between 1800 and 1914. From the moving panoramas that started to tour during the early 1800s to the establishment of hundreds of fixed venue cinemas from approximately 1908, pictorial media were key elements in the advent of several entertainment industries. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence from local newspapers and trade journals in the UK, this book details the visual shows that were on offer, where and what they were, the networks and infrastructure they existed within, and, above all, how ordinary people experienced them.

Popular Visual Shows maps the scale of the industry of moving and projected images prior to and including film. It proposes new understandings of individual media like the diorama, panorama, peepshow and magic lantern, emphasising the crossover between different exhibition formats, performance norms, touring networks, and visual technologies. The book argues that, over the course of the nineteenth century, panoramas and dioramas developed as remarkably "open mediums," tending to accumulate new modes of performance and new technologies. Whether it was a large painted tableaux at a local fair or a myiorama performed in a grand variety theatre with a touring company of musicians, machinists and performers, the "panorama" encompassed so many types of show that it becomes hard to see it as just one technology, one medium, or one type of experience. 

Oxford University Press adds that this book

• Delivers the first book to show the scale of the industry of moving and projected images prior to the invention of film
• Offers a radically expanded idea of the habit of 'going to the pictures' and what that meant
• Draws on a wealth of new evidence from nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers on what ordinary men, women, and families enjoyed as popular entertainment
• Proposes new understandings of individual media formats like the peepshow