Victorian catalogues sold purchasable Oriental fantasy items to Americans.

Evidence

In the absence of a widespread ability to travel with ease, everyday Victorian Americans could simply open the illustrated catalogue, Products from the Orient, to easily recreate harems, bazaars, and palaces that they read about in travelogues and saw on display at fairs. Those catalogues offered items such as “embroidered slippers as worn by Turkish ladies in Harems” or lanterns that gave off a glow that was “most suggestive of Arabian Night and Oriental life,” allowing buyers to purchase their own piece of the Orient. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 661

Categorization

• CANDY: A fun, tweetable image: Victorians could mail-order their own ‘piece of the Orient’ including harem slippers and Arabian Nights-glow lanterns.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in orientalism-as-consumerism or the material culture of manufactured imagery.
• XREF: connects to: Syrian merchants profited by supplying America’s Orientalist consumer fantasies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 226