The popular culture of Victorian Britain, as described by a contemporary observer, comprised heterogeneous 'exhibitions, galleries, and museums' devoted to 'popular education in the young and in the adult'. These forms of respectable recreation became the 'libraries of those who have no money to expend on books . . . [and] the travel of those that have no time to bestow on travel'. Among the 'amusements for mind and senses' which 'woo the world of London at every turn', the National Review counted 'lecture-rooms, dioramas, panoramas, cheap concerts, oratorios, public gardens, and innumerable other diversions, suited to every scale of purse and every variety of taste and cultivation'. Informative entertainments such as the Diorama in Regent's Park, the Cosmorama (an indoor 'peepshow' gallery of famous sites from around the world) in Regent Street, and Wyld's Great Globe in Leicester Square exercised cultural governance over an imperial city whose population at mid-century passed 2,000,000. This thriving popular culture was nothing if not visual. From the Illustrated London News to stereoscope photographs (double images of the same subject which, when inserted into a viewer, create the illusion of three dimensions), and from the annual Royal Academy exhibitions to cartes de visite (small, inexpensive photographic portraits suitable for mounting in an album), the Victorians were insatiable consumers of pictures.