The 1820s were an era of spectacle and conscious spectatorship, of gazing, ogling, perusing, peeping and prying. In 1780, there were six London theatres. By 1830, not only were there twenty-five new theatres, but the size of several individual theatres had doubled. Many new opportunities for public gazing opened up after the Napoleonic Wars. The National Gallery opened in 1824; the Zoological Society of London first admitted public zoo-goers in 1828. From 1829, the Colosseum Panorama in Regent's Park offered visitors brave enough to ascend to its gallery a bird's eye view of London as if from the Dome of St Pauls. Vertiginously perched aloft, they might spot their own home depicted below on over an acre of canvas. Meanwhile, the mirror curtain of 1821, at the Royal Coburg Theatre, reflected the audience back to itself in sixty-three panes of glass and Regent Street – with John Nash's triumphal parade of colonnades inviting window shopping and discreet scrutiny of oneself and others – was completed in 1825. These burgeoning new forms of visual entertainment fostered a newly acute awareness, particularly in cities, of the street as itself a theatre crowded with types who might themselves be spies, impostors, gentlemen or ‘flash coves’ with links to the sporting fraternity and the criminal underworld. Real Life in London (1821), one of over sixty imitations of Pierce Egan's rowdy pub crawl of the capital's entertainments Life in London, advertised itself as ‘exhibiting a living picture’. Its dynamic, crowded illustrations invited readers to study audiences at a boxing match, a bear-baiting, a masquerade ball, and to enter the Fleet Prison, emphasising that to view and to be viewed was to join the fast-moving London scene.

Periodicals flourished in the post-war marketplace, making it easier to pique one's curiosity about one's neighbours and increasing the range of visual material available to buy, whether a pin-up of a scantily dressed houri from a literary annual or a comic song illustrated by Cruikshank. Simultaneously, as Jonathan Crary has explored, this period saw a new preoccupation with scientific understanding of vision and experiments that would lead to new viewing technologies such as the diorama, first exhibited in London by Louis Daguerre in 1823.