The 1820s witnessed what contemporaries regarded as an unprecedented explosion of visual and theatrical spectacle. From the many panoramas of military and naval victories, especially of Trafalgar and Waterloo, to recently discovered marvels like the artefacts on display at Egyptian Hall in London from 1821, it was a decade where crowds flocked to novel forms of entertainment. These entertainments have sometimes been contrasted with an emptying-out of literary genres deemed more serious, but they were part of an emergent media ecology that placed great value on performance and included a wealth of writing about city life. Take Marguerite Blessington's The Magic Lantern, or Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822), which describes a series of fashionable cultural sites, including the model tomb at Egyptian Hall, but pays as much attention to the audience displaying itself as to the objects on display. Her title speaks to the idea of London as a show in itself, a series of novel scenes or sketches driven by new media technologies. As in Pierce Egan's more famous Life in London (1821), there was a growing sense of a newly expanded audience for culture as itself a performance that readers were invited to enjoy, a sense that started to inflect broader ideas of social being and personal identity.

The coronation of George IV in 1821 set the tone of a theatrical decade, soon followed by his royal tour of Scotland in August 1822, an event much reproduced as a theatre spectacle, just as the coronation itself was soon adapted into rival panoramic versions that competed over the number of figures they displayed. Not that all was acclaim: George IV continued to be the target of a torrent of visual and verbal satires that presented him performing a variety of roles from Macbeth in 1820 to the Great Joss in 1829. Whatever the topical target of any of these attacks, each played on the idea of the monarch as the presiding spirit of a society of empty display and pretentious self-importance. The idea of George IV as ‘a sort of state-puppets [sic] or royal wax-work’, in William Hazlitt's words, tapped into a broader fear about the precarity of personal identity.