In his discussion of the commodity culture of Victorian England, Thomas Richards (22) focuses on what he calls the "Great Exhibition of Things" which occurred at a point in Britain's history when industrialization and mass production were accelerating in tandem with the growth of a more affluent and materialistic middle class. In the Crystal Palace in 1851, Richards (28) states that the Great Exhibition presented visitors with an almost unlimited assortment of new consumer goods, many of which were extremely exotic and reflected Britain's growing capacity to draw upon its overseas colonies for raw materials as well as a design aesthetic.
Richards (30) says that "the Crystal Palace combined museum, laboratory, factory, railway station, workshop, theater, auditorium, restaurant, and greenhouse, but in a crucial sense it was also something quite different from any of these." It was a place in which an assortment of consumable goods or commodities were warehoused, providing even working class consumers with opportunities to become actively engaged with merchandising and exposed to products that were intended to enrich their manufacturers as well as their buyers. Richards (40) stated that the Great Exhibition proved that "the best way to sell things to the English was to sell them the culture and ideology of England" which included its dreams of Empire, social standards, and codes of conduct.
In his analysis of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Jeffrey Auerbach (108) stated that it was clear "that industry and industrialization were not yet taken for granted... and in that respect the exhibition was designed to serve an important educational function." He discusses the "manufactures" or the new products and processes that were bringing a plethora of new and in many cases affordable consumer goods to various sectors of the market. Auerbach (108) also stated that many of the organizers of this event were concerned "about social...