History

The greatest, unfinished show on earth

Six million people, including the Queen, visited the Great Exhibition david horspool

In the summer of 1851, 170 years ago, there was only one destination for the holidaymaker: London, and in particular Hyde Park, where the Great Exhibition was in full swing.

Joseph Paxton’s astonishing Crystal Palace – doodled on a blotter when the original design was failing to inspire confidence – was opened by the Queen and Prince Albert on 1st May.

For ten days, admission cost £1; from then on, it went steadily down until, by June, you could get in for a shilling Monday to Thursday, half a crown on Friday and 5s on Saturdays. Many visitors (including the Queen) came back, and 25,000 of them bought season tickets.

What did they come to see? It was an ‘Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, including, but not limited to, those of Britain’s empire. In fact, all was not quiet on the imperial front: the British had fought wars in Afghanistan, Punjab and other parts of India in the 1840s, and had faced unrest in South Africa, Ceylon, Jamaica and even Canada.

But if the 1840s had seen the iron fist of the likes of Charles Napier (‘I have Sind’) and the doomed incompetence of the Afghan campaigns, the Great Exhibition was a chance to show the benefits of soft power. So under Paxton’s glass were carvings from Bengal, and the contents of packing cases from Sydney and Nova Scotia, from Malta and the Bahamas.

The Exhibition was a more or less explicit expression of the glories of free trade, some of which were lost on imperial markets. So it was also open to the manufactures (and raw materials, machinery and mechanical inventions, and sculpture and plastic art) of continental Europe (including Russia) and the Americas.

And if it seemed in bad taste to mention Britain’s difficulties in her colonies, the same went for continental cousins’ political troubles of 1848.

As the Illustrated London News put it,

The Crystal Palace, home to the Great Exhibition (1st May to 15th October 1851)

‘the revolutions, incipient or halfextinguished, in Germany, Italy and France, awake no echoes in the popular mind’.

The whole thing was the brainchild of Henry Cole, one of those dynamos of Victorian ingenuity who deserve to be better known. As well as being the driving force behind the Great Exhibition, he was a civil servant, children’s author and inventor of a new type of teapot – and he patented the first commercial Christmas card. His was the kind of forward-looking energy that appealed to the Queen’s consort and, sure enough, with Prince Albert’s backing, the project received official support, though it was a wholly private enterprise.

That is not the only way in which the Exhibition differed markedly from modern imitators. To us, more used to project timescales that would be familiar to the constructors of medieval cathedrals, the idea that the Great Exhibition commission was formed only in January 1850, less than a year and a half before its opening, seems inconceivable.

Naturally, there was scepticism. The initial building plan, which would have landed London with a brick dome larger than St Paul’s in a park, and a vast building like a railway station without a track, was tolerated rather than welcomed.

That was why Paxton’s last-minute reimagining of the glass house he had made for his patron, the Duke of Devonshire, proved so popular. And no one quite believed it would be ready in time, the workmen furiously painting and chasing away (or poisoning) nesting birds up to the last minute.

In fact, strictly speaking, it wasn’t complete. Victoria remarked to her diary, amid general gushing about her husband’s triumph, that ‘Many things in the French section, are (strange to say) not ready.’

Not every nation embraced the opportunity to show off its achievements with equal vigour. The most tragic contribution must have been the Dutch one. A Dutch poet was moved to describe his country’s contribution as a ‘dark wasteland’, and the commissioner charged with overseeing this embarrassment actually killed himself. Joseph Nash, who painted scenes from the exhibition, has one showing the contribution of Holland, next to Belgium, with painted screens, jewels and metalwork. It is hard to see that the commissioner had much to be ashamed of.

What was it all for? Any hopes that it might foster a new spirit of co-operation among nations seem to have been scotched early. Thomas Carlyle was not alone in lamenting the ‘bearded, foreign people’ the event encouraged. But Victoria’s hopes that ‘It ought to do wonders in enlightening people & opening the eyes of many ignorant young people’ must surely have been met to some degree, as up to six million visitors passed along its aisles. It also made money, enough to finance the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the rest of what became known as Albertopolis.

Paxton’s wonder house was taken down and moved to Sydenham, where it continued to dazzle until it was burned down in 1936, a grimly apposite extinction of Victorian optimism by the coming age of barbarism.