The Great Exhibition

Great Exhibition, 1851. Master-minded by Albert, the Great Exhibition was the largest trade show the world had ever seen. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, spanning 19 acres within Hyde Park (London), was accepted after 233 other plans had been rejected. Some 6 million people between 1 May and 11 October 1851, many of them on railway excursions, visited 100, 000 exhibits. Queen Victoria, always keen on her husband's achievements, visited 34 times. Profits secured land in Kensington, future sites for the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum.

Opened with great pomp and ceremony by Queen Victoria this seminal international exhibition was held in what the periodical Punch dubbed ‘the Crystal Palace’, a prefabricated structure of iron and glass designed by Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park, London. It attracted more than 6 million visitors, involved more than 15,000 exhibitors, and had more than 10 miles (16 km) of display frontage. Fifty per cent of the exhibiting space was devoted to 7,351 British and Empire products and the rest to 6,556 products from overseas. Although it had been hoped that the Great Exhibition would bring together positively the fields of art, science, and manufacture, in the event it attracted considerable critical debate. Many of the highly ornamented and decorative designs exhibited technical ingenuity for its own sake and, as a result, attracted the antipathy of leading Victorian design critics. These included Richard Redgrave, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, Owen Jones, and others opposed to what Augustus Welby Pugin and John Ruskin saw as morally decadent and constructionally dishonest products. The 17-year-old William Morris was also horrified by what he saw. However, it should also be remembered that many of the designs that featured on such an important international stage were especially made to win prestige and were therefore by nature more decorative and deliberately eye-catching than many more functional and ornamentally restrained designs for everyday mass production. International exhibitions, by their very nature, were designed to explore new markets, to consolidate existing ones, or to establish leadership in particular fields, thus providing important platforms for national economic and industrial policy initiatives.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations had its generic roots in a series of French National Exhibitions that had begun in Paris in 1798 where manufacturers from many branches of industry showed a wide range of products including ceramics, glass, furniture, and textiles. Just as the French National Exhibitions had been intended to restore French manufacturing industry to its former position of dominance in the wake of the political upheavals of the Revolution, so the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the culmination of a number of initiatives in the 1830s and 1840s to re-establish the position of British industry as the ‘workshop of the world’ after a period of decline following the Napoleonic Wars. These included the establishment in 1935 of a Parliamentary Select Committee on The Arts and their Connection with Manufacturers and the subsequent institution of a national framework for design education. By 1849, the 11th French National Exhibition attracted 4,500 exhibitors and its scale and ambition resulted in key British design propagandists Henry Cole and Digby Wyatt being asked to report back on it to the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). In Britain, during the 1840s, the Royal Society of Arts had itself mounted a series of small-scale competitions promoting British industrial products that embraced the principles of artistic design. Such initiatives had brought Cole into the Society and, from 1847, developed into a series of annual exhibitions of industrial products culminating in the show of 1849, which attracted 73,000 visitors over a period of seven weeks. With the support of Prince Albert, the president of the RSA, and spurred on by Cole and Wyatt's 1849 report that the French were themselves considering an international exhibition, British ambitions were raised to do the same and a Royal Commission was swiftly established early in 1850 to oversee its development. Although the RSA severed its formal connections with the exhibition as a result, a number of its key members continued to serve on the commission.

At the Great Exhibition itself the public could admire many works that could be seen to embrace the interlinked fields of art, science, and manufacture, typified by a range of high-quality products manufactured by the Coalbrookdale Company. Amongst them were the ornamental gates to the exhibition, an Iron Dome, chairs, sculptures, and a variety of detailed ornamental castings, a number of which were designed by artists that had been employed by Henry Cole for his Felix Summerley's Art Manufactures. Of considerable public interest were the machine tools and other exhibits that reflected the advances that had been made in civil and mechanical engineering, including railway locomotives, Nasmyth's steam hammer, marine engines by Maudslay and others, more than twenty machine tools manufactured by Whitworth, and the crowd-pulling envelope-making machine by De La Rue. Such attention reflected the considerable esteem that the public held for Victorian engineers. Visitors were also able to indulge their curiosity in countless other exemplars of technical virtuosity, whether a garden seat for Queen Victoria carved from a block of coal, a penknife with 80 blades and tools, or steamship furniture capable of conversion to life-rafts. The literal absurdity of such exhibits was satirized in Punch magazine's account of ‘Mr Punch's Counter at the Great Exhibition’, a distant resonance of Jonathan Swift's ironic portrayal of the Royal Society in his satirical novel Gulliver's Travels published 125 years earlier. By the mid 19th century materials such as papier maché had achieved a considerable level of durability, approaching that of wood, and could be seen in a wide variety of artefacts, from chairs to pianos. Articles manufactured from gutta percha, a material first intorduced to the British public in the 1840s and patented in 1844, were also displayed at the exhibition. It was able to be moulded, stamped, coloured, cast, and polished and was used for a wide variety of goods, including ornaments. Also widely admired for their novelty in 1851 were electroplated industrial art products and examples of Parian were, a medium imitating marble and capable of holding considerable detail that had been developed by ceramic manufacturers Minton & Copeland in the 1840s.

Amongst the many functional exhibits on display in the Crystal Palace the greatest impression was made by those from the United States of America that capitalized on the exploitation of standardization as a means of harnessing the true potential of mass-production technologies for mass markets. This outlook became known as the American System of Manufactures and was seen in products such as Colt's firearms, Hobbs' locks, McCormick's reaper and sewing machines. Its economic potential was sufficient to bring about the establishment of a Royal Commission that reported on the Machinery of the United States in 1854-5.

The Great Exhibition proved to be a highly profitable venture with a profit of £186,437, the surplus being used for educational purposes including the purchase of 87 acres (35 hectares) in South Kensington, London, as a centre for the arts and sciences. It was here that the 1862 International and the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibitions were later mounted and now housed a number of key buildings connected with the arts and sciences including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, Imperial College, and the Science Museum. The 1851 exhibition also stimulated a whole series of other international exhibitions, commencing with the Great Industrial Exhibition in Dublin and the World's Fair in New York in 1853, followed by the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855.

Great Exhibition, London, 1 May-15 October 1851. Originally called ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, it was housed in Joseph Paxton's revolutionary and very photogenic Crystal Palace, which was extensively photographed by British (B. B. Turner, Robert Howlett, et al.) and French (Jules Dubosq, Baron Gros) photographers, both at its original site in South Kensington and in 1854 when it was moved to Sydenham (Philip Delamotte). In addition to its thousands of other exhibits, it incorporated the first large international exhibition of photography, exhibiting a range of materials and styles that most of the public had never before witnessed. (Terms like photograph, positive, and negative had to be explained in the catalogue.) Although most photographs were placed in Class X with musical and scientific instruments, some calotype landscapes were shown in the Fine Arts section, and received awards. Singled out for special praise were French calotypes and American daguerreotypes (including 48 by Mathew Brady), which were hailed as the best on show; John Whipple's daguerreotype of the moon inspired the British businessman Warren de la Rue (1815-89) to enter the field himself. The exhibition, which was visited by over 6 million people, not only increased awareness of photography in general but publicized important innovations, most notably Archer's revolutionary wet-plate process. Queen Victoria's enthusiasm for Dubosq's stereo-daguerreotypes of the exhibition boosted the incipient craze for stereoscopic images.

Another fillip to photography was the jury's decision to use it instead of lithography to illustrate its final report, which eventually included c. 150 photographs of industrial products. Finally, the Great Exhibition's success encouraged the founding of the Photographic Society of London (later Royal Photographic Society), which eventually came into being in January 1853.

Bibliography

• Haworth-Booth, M. (ed.), The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839-1900 (1984)

— Kelley E. Wilder/Robin Lenman

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, in 1851.

The Great Exhibition 1851

The enormous Crystal Palace went from plans to grand opening in just nine months.

Exhibition interior

The front entrance of the Great Exhibition

Paxton's Crystal Palace enclosed full-grown trees in Hyde Park.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or Great Exhibition, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in reference to the temporary structure in which it was held, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park, London, England, from 1 May to 15 October 1851. It was the first in a series of World's Fair exhibitions of culture and industry that were to become a popular 19th-century feature. The Great Exhibition was organised by Henry Cole and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the spouse of the reigning monarch, Victoria. It was attended by numerous notable figures of the time, including Charles Darwin, members of the Orléanist Royal Family and the writers Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot.

Contents 1 Background 2 Notable exhibits 3 Admission fees 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Background

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was organized by Prince Albert, Henry Cole, Francis Henry, George Wallis, Charles Dilke and other members of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce as a celebration of modern industrial technology and design. It can be argued that the Great Exhibition was mounted in response to the highly successful French Industrial Exposition of 1844. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, was an enthusiastic promoter of a self-financing exhibition; the government was persuaded to form the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to establish the viability of hosting such an exhibition. Queen Victoria and her family visited three times.

A special building, nicknamed The Crystal Palace,^[1] was designed by Joseph Paxton (with support from structural engineer Charles Fox) to house the show; an architecturally adventurous building based on Paxton's experience designing greenhouses for the sixth Duke of Devonshire, constructed from cast iron-frame components and glass made almost exclusively in Birmingham and Smethwick, it was an enormous success. The committee overseeing its construction included Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The massive glass house was 1848 feet (about 563 metres) long by 454 feet (about 138 metres) wide and went from its initial plans of organisation to its grand opening in just nine months. The building was later moved and re-erected in an enlarged form at Sydenham in south London, an area that was renamed Crystal Palace; it was eventually destroyed by fire on November 30, 1936.^[1]

Six million people—equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time—visited the exhibition. The Great Exhibition made a surplus of £186,000, which was used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, which were all built in the area to the south of the exhibition, nicknamed Albertopolis, alongside the Imperial Institute. The remaining surplus was used to set up an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research and continues to do so today.^[2]

The exhibition caused controversy at the time. Some conservatives feared that the mass of visitors might become a revolutionary mob,^{[citation needed]} whilst radicals such as Karl Marx saw the exhibition as an emblem of the capitalist fetishism of commodities. In modern times, the Great Exhibition has become a symbol of the Victorian Age, and its thick catalogue illustrated with steel engravings is a primary source for High Victorian design. ^[3]

Notable exhibits

Exhibits came, not only from throughout Britain, but also its expanding imperial colonies, such as Australia, India and New Zealand, and foreign countries, such as Denmark, France and Switzerland. Numbering 13,000 in total, they included a Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, kitchen appliances, steel-making displays and a reaping machine that was sent from the United States.^[4]

• Alfred Charles Hobbs used the exhibition to demonstrate the inadequacy of several respected locks of the day.
• Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a precursor to today's fax machine.
• Mathew Brady was awarded a medal for his daguerreotypes.
• William Chamberlin, Jr. of Sussex exhibited what may have been the world's first voting machine, which counted votes automatically and employed an interlocking system to prevent over-voting.^[5]
• The Tempest Prognosticator, a barometer using leeches, was demonstrated at the Great Exhibition.
• The America's Cup yachting event began with a race held in conjunction with the Great Exhibition.
• George Jennings designed the first public conveniences in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace, for which he charged one penny.
• The Koh-i-noor, the world's biggest known diamond at the time of the Great Exhibition.
• The Gold Ornaments and Silver Enameled Handicrafts fabricated by Khudabadi Sindhi Swarankar from Sindh.
• C.C. Hornung of Copenhagen, Denmark, showed his single-cast ironframe for a piano, the first made in Europe.

Admission fees

Admission prices to the Crystal Palace varied according to the date of visitation, with ticket prices decreasing as the parliamentary season drew to an end and London traditionally emptied of wealthy individuals. Prices varied from three guineas per day, £1 per day, five shillings per day, down to one shilling per day. The one-shilling ticket proved most successful amongst the industrial classes, with four and a half million shillings being taken from attendees in this manner.^[6]

See also

• List of world's fairs
• Festival of Britain

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "The Great Exhibition of 1851". Duke Magazine. 2006-11. http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/111206/depgal2.html. Retrieved 2007-07-30. 
2. ^ The Royal Commission for the ExhibITION of 1851. "About Us". http://www.royalcommission1851.org.uk/about.html. Retrieved 2008-11-01. 
3. ^ A copy of the Illustrated Catalogue is available on Google books at http://www.google.com/books?id=OfMHAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0
4. ^ "The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace". Victorian Station. Accessed 3 February 2009.
5. ^ "The Great Exhibition," Manchester Times (24 May 1851).
6. ^ "Entrance Costs to the Great Exhibition". Fashion Era. Accessed 3 February 2009.

Further reading

• Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, Yale University Press, 1999.
• Gibbs-Smith, Charles Harvard. The Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd edition, London: HMSO, 1981.
• Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester University Press, 1988.
• Leapman, Michael. The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation, Headline Books, 2001.
• Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Dickinson Brothers, London, 1854.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Crystal Palace

• Prince Albert's speech of 1849, announcing "The Exhibition of 1851"
• "Memorials of the Great Exhibition" Cartoon Series from Punch
• Royal Engineers Museum Royal Engineers and the Great Exhibition
• "In Our Time" BBC radio programme discussing the Great Exhibition and its impact
• Charlotte Bronte's account of a visit to the Great Exhibition
• Great Exhibition Collection in the National Art Library
• "Watercolours of the Great Exhibition". Paintings and Drawings. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/paintings/past_exh/greatEx_watercolours/index.html. Retrieved 2007-11-13. 

Preceded by (none)

World Expositions 1851

Succeeded by Exposition Universelle (1855)

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