The Prose of Things

Article Summary

The Prose of Things

             

            The revolutionary expansion of the British Empire, improvement of transportation, a national wide carrier system, the wide spread use of advertisement in newspapers and the mobility among population had huge impact on changing the people’s ideology of commodities and their use to an extent that the era came to be known as the World of Goods (Wall 150, 51). Moreover, the interest of acquisitiveness was not the only reason for some people, especially from the middle class, to collect such specimens or commodities, but also it was used as means of climbing up in the social leader as Wall asserts “auctions catalogs and auctioneers seems to have done something in the way of gentrifying themselves and their position” (Wall 174). The blind interest of these goods or commodities that does not bring any profit either scientific or economic and only collected to show off demonstrates the social shallowness (Wall 188).Furthermore, people’s eagerness to know or to see what other people have coincided with the revolutionary blast of goods from all over the world. Therefore, new methods of seeing things were invented, recycled or perfected to encapsulate and guide this demand to the tradesmen benefit (Wall 149). 

Wall after that brings up the history of shopping and advertising and how they improved over the years. Before the sixteenth century, much of the trade was carried out in street markets; tradesmen used tables to present their goods. Soon after, some craftsmen in the 16^th and 17^th century started using their front rooms or the ground floor as a workshop and salesroom. However, it was not until the 19^th century when the era of space innovation and development spread around England and shops were built and incorporated into a uniform. Defoe asserts that “it is a modern custom to have tradesmen lay out two thirds of their fortune in fitting up their shops” (Wall 160). Industrialization and urbanization were main reasons for the increase of retail shops. By 1750 more people worked in industry, trade, commerce and services than in agriculture.

The article flushes out the importance of literal transparency and its role as media. Shop-window as a new style of advertising changed the ideology in which the goods are arranged. Before the appearance of newspaper, shopkeepers depended on the shop’s sign and their local reputation as means of advertising. Wall, then illustrates how new methods of advertising led people into attending auctions and buying catalog of houses. Auctions were not only assembled for buyers, since they display items that are not for sale at that moment, but also for amusement. For instance, the catalogs give background of the furniture and their past owner and how they will change the future of their buyer (Wall 169). Toward the end of the chapter Wall highlight some of the narratives and writers who changed the ideology of critiquing and structuring great houses or castles.

I loved the argument on page 154, when Wall introduced James H. Bunn claims that the escalation of things in the eighteenth century estranges the world making it difficult to encompass visually with words. And shortly after, she introduces Warren Hunting Smith’s idea that writers did not know the interior of the houses which their characters inhabited. Then he argues against these ideas by providing evidence that people in general were acquainted with houses through tours of great houses, many writers at that time had first-hand experience in great houses, and that most of the characters in these narratives are from the middle sort who could travel between classes. To sum up, the part of the book that I have read was really helpful for me to understand the process in which collecting, advertisement, shopping and auctions grow to become phenomena in the western countries.