Introduction

Summary

By the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 225

In the mid-1830s, new glass-making technology was introduced into England, technology which allowed the mass production of glass sheets of unprecedented size. With the repeal of the excise tax in the forties, the market for these glass sheets expanded considerably, and by the early fifties panes of up to four feet in length were being made fairly regularly. Health-reformers and construction firms encouraged the use of the new sheets in domestic architecture, but the most immediate and visible beneficiaries of these technological developments were retailers who used the glass for their display windows. These windows radically transfigured the experience of walking through commercial sections of London, fashioning the streets into gas-lit spaces of Utopian splendor. “When we arrive at St. Paul's Churchyard,” wrote one observer in 1851, “we come to a very world of show. Here we find a shop whose front presents an uninterrupted mass of glass from the ceiling to the ground.” This “world of show” became the occasion for elaborate fantasies of consumption, sensuous experiences of imagined acquisition, and almost immediately these sheets of glass and the fantasies they encouraged were used as evidence displaying the material progress of the nation and its capitol, uniting observers in admiration: