The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification.

The V&A is the most complete example. From the beginning it had populist and didactic intentions: collecting photographs began in the 1850s. There was a campaigning instinct: its exhibitions worked as Victorian social media, encouraging the public and rebuking manufacturers on questions of ‘taste’. And the magnificent Cast Courts were a database of accurate reproductions for visitors without the benefit of art books or European travel to enjoy free on Sundays. With nice appropriateness, Room 46B, the Italian Cast Court, has just been refurbished with a grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the charity of the family that owns Selfridges department stores (as well as Fortnum & Mason and Primark).