This paper reconstructs and deconstructs a popular and powerful argument against Orientalism presented in the mid-19th century to an eager British and American audience. In the late summer of 1854, the West End of London was the site of a new entertainment for the masses of pleasure-seekers drawn to panoramas, exhibitions, and theatrical performances in the capital of the burgeoning British Empire. Perched at the busy Piccadilly intersection of Hyde Park Corner in St. George's Gallery was the Oriental and Turkish Museum, the brainchild of an Armenian from Istanbul named Christopher Oscanyan. Along with a Mr. S. Aznavour, Oscanyan spent ten months realizing a new amusement that he hoped would present a more humanistic portrait of the Ottomans and aspects of their history and culture. As an Istanbul native educated in New York City, Oscanyan worked from within and without Western culture to simultaneously challenge and reify Western notions of the Ottoman Empire as functionally withered and dying. He used his London museum and its extensive Guide Book, as well as his 1857 bestseller The Sultan and His People and several Broadway revues in New York City to urge British and American audiences to consider the Ottoman Empire a modern partner in trade, commerce, and culture. At the same time, he fed images of luxury and decadence with his historical narrative of the Ottomans, all the while trying to nuance the sweeping generalizations of Western observers of the Turks and their dominions. In this way, Oscanyan's museum and the subsequent literature surrounding it sought to divorce the Ottoman court from the population of Turkey, reject foreign notions of moral decline among Ottoman subjects, and promote support for reform among Westerners sympathetic to the Ottoman cause. This paper presents evidence gleaned from archives and field work conducted in the Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and speaks loudly to reinject Middle Eastern voices into the dialogue about Orientalism among Westerners and Middle Easterners, a conversation often presented by Western scholars as merely a European monologue.