This image feels like time-travel, literally, or perhaps time-viewing. It was taken through the viewing lens of a peep-show currently in the collection of the Bill Douglas Museum at the University of Exeter, having previously belonged to the British Film institute’s Museum of the Moving Image. And what’s initially remarkable is that you can’t see anything at all with the naked eye.
So what is it? According to the peepshow’s label, it shows the crypt of Lastingham Church, and it’s thought to date from the 19th century. If that rings no bell, as it didn’t for me, some quick research reveals that St Mary’s at Lastingham in North Yorkshire is a remarkable structure. It dates back to the years immediately after William the Conqueror arrived in 1066, and survives in remarkably original form.
But the large crypt is apparently unique, with walls nearly a metre thick: the oldest Norman crypt in the world, with pillars which may even date back to a pre-conquest abbey on the site. A structure that has impressed everyone interested in historic English architecture, from Pevsner and Betjeman to Simon Jenkins. So perhaps not totally surprising that someone thought it was worth recreating that eerie sense of history in a peepshow – even one that must have been hard to peep at with 19th-century illumination, and impossible to photograph?
Peepshows (or boîtes optiques in French) are a relatively neglected tradition that continue the 17th century Dutch tradition of Perspective Boxes in a variety of forms. One of these, which would have been called a Raree Show, appears in Bill Douglas’s 1986 film Comrades – the prop version seen here, with the collection’s co-founder Peter Jewell showing it to Birkbeck students on our visit.
In the early 19th century, Perspective Views were sold to be viewed via a diagonal mirror in smaller boxes. Later, telescopic or concertina peepshows made of cardboard became popular, and the BDC has fine examples of one made for Queen Victoria’s Coronation and another of the Tunnel under the Thames that opened in 1843.
The Victoria and Albert Museum also has a fine collection of these forms of Peepshow, appropriately donated by Jacqueline and Jonathan Gestetner (of the printing device family), usefully catalogued at https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/paper-peepshows.
And what do they have to do with early cinema? Edison’s Kinetoscope would have been recognised by Victorians as a superior form of moving peepshow, with many portable forms derived from it that offered animated images , such as the Filoscope – invented by Robert Paul’s associate Henry Short, and well represented in the BDM collection in Exeter (see earlier post, “A Pope in Your Pocket’). More about what close study of these can reveal about early film in a forthcoming blog…
With thanks to BDM Curator Philip Wickham for generous access to the collection and permission to reproduce these pictures.
Paul's Animatograph Works 