Artefacts, displays and the imperial gaze: sensory encounters at the international exhibition of 1862

This article examines sensory accounts of spectators at the International Exhibition of 1862 in order to reconsider how exhibitionary power operated in practice. Building on work on the exhibitionary complex and on Orientalism, it argues that the 1862 Exhibition did not function as a seamless apparatus of imperial pedagogy but as a compromised site where narratives of Western progress and civilisational difference were strained in the encounter between curatorial authority and embodied spectatorship. Through close readings of four testimonies by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Munby, a Temple Bar satire voiced by a blind narrator, and an orientalist review by an unnamed woman, the article traces how their divergent vantage points produce competing ways of seeing, moving through, and narrating the exhibition. These polyvocal responses show spectators and artefacts slipping beyond the visual and textual scripts supplied by catalogues and the imperial gaze, putting pressure on the Orientalist binaries of East and West and bringing into view zones of cultural hybridity and mutual exchange. By foregrounding these uneven sensory encounters, the article extends accounts of international exhibitions as technologies of governance and colonial knowledge, and reframes the 1862 Exhibition as a historically marginal yet revealing site in which the limits of exhibitionary power became visible.