The lid of this box is decorated with a transfer-printed engraving by the watercolour painter Theodore Lane (c.1800-1828) from Pierce Egan's book The Life of an Actor printed in 1825. By this date Pierce Egan (1772-1849) was well-known as the author of Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom illustrated by George and Robert Cruikshank. Egan invented The Life of an Actor around a series of thirty-six subjects designed and etched by Lane illustrating an actor's life. This shows a performance to an almost empty house - one of the difficulties that beset the actor in his book before he found fame and fortune.

The mass market for theatrical memorabilia such as this box developed in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century, coinciding with the commercial production of papier maché for objects such as boxes and frames. In 1772 a patent for the production of a durable papier maché was granted to Henry Clay of Birmingham who developed a process whereby layers of paper like blotting paper were pasted on to a wood or metal core, each layer being polished smooth with pumice stone. The earliest boxes were hand painted but after about 1815 hand-painted boxes were supplanted by those decorated with coloured prints, pasted on and varnished. A wide variety of subjects were used, from prints of buildings such as the Crystal Palace, to images of landscapes and animals. Boxes like these have generally been described as snuff boxes, too large to be portable but intended for table-top use.