ABSTRACT
The British reader of the Smokers' Pastils advertisement identifies with Lady Montagu's class and racial privileges of mobility and observation and thus is, initially, positioned to see with Lady Montagu, "the beauties of the Harem smoking." The faux Lady Montagu endorsement was cleverly timed, as the harem figured prominently in Victorian public discourses in several ways. The advertisement's location in The Graphic, a middle-class weekly illustrated newspaper, suggests that under certain conditions the institutions of capitalism would not hesitate to draw equivalences between women in different cultures, appealing to British aspirations of social mobility. The frontispiece of the first bound volume of The Graphic features an engraving of Gustav Richter's "An Odalisque", followed by the title page, introduction, and an index, and then the reader encounters Richter's "Egyptian Girl," the cover image of the first issue. All of the commodities are more or less able to be possessed by the male readers of The Graphic.
