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The Great Exhibition of 1851
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
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Peter Trippi |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park was an unprecedented display of Britain as an industrial and imperial power. Manufacturing and culture from around the world was also gathered in the building that was soon dubbed the Crystal Palace. Peter Trippi outlines the genesis and the impact of this defining event of the Victorian world. |
 etween May 1851, when it was opened in London by Queen Victoria, and October 1851, when it was closed by her consort Prince Albert, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations attracted more than 6 million visitors, making it the most heavily attended event known to that date. Forerunner of many international expositions and world's fairs, this Great Exhibition has been imprinted indelibly on the Western consciousness via the "Crystal Palace," the name given immediately to its innovative building by the satirical magazine Punch. |
Although the Exhibition displayed more than 100,000 objects, its most renowned exhibit was the building itself. Erected in less than nine months to the plans of the English horticulturist and conservatory designer Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace rose over 18 acres of London's Hyde Park, enclosing 33 million cubic feet and 21 acres of exhibiting space. The ironwork and glass for the building were manufactured in Birmingham, more than 100 miles from London, making it an early--and gigantic--example of prefabricated construction. This innovative technology imparted a geometric precision and functional clarity that has led later architects to identify the Crystal Palace as one of the first truly modern buildings. Though this is a reasonable assertion in some senses, it would be wrong to underestimate the extent to which traditional forms and methods contributed to the building's success. The central core of the Crystal Palace was, in effect, made in wood by skilled artisans, while each of the 300,000 sheets of glass was individually cylinder-blown. |
Venturing through one of three entrances, visitors were awed by the unprecedented scale of the Crystal Palace: 1,848 feet long and 408 feet wide, the transept soaring 108 feet. The Welsh designer Owen Jones co-ordinated an interior scheme of alternating blue, yellow, and red pillars and girders that stretched into the distance, accented by dark red banners announcing from the upper floor's galleries the locations of particular exhibits. Browsing among the wares of the nearly 14,000 exhibitors, visitors must have felt they were in a giant greenhouse as they encountered tropical plants, a glass fountain and fully grown elms undamaged by the construction.
Visitors could spend the entire day inside enjoying refreshment courts, the first public "comfort" rooms for both men and women, filtered water, the music of 24 pipe organs and splendid vistas from the upper galleries. |
The aims of the Great Exhibition
The event was organized by a Royal Commission whose two most influential leaders were Prince Albert and Henry Cole. The commissioners had a number of interdependent motives, of which commerce was perhaps the most overt. They hoped the Exhibition would increase foreign trade and promote discerning consumption at home through elevation of the taste of producers and consumers alike. The Exhibition also had a strong social and political agenda, in that it was intended to give the nation a sense of cohesion and loyalty in a period of unrest. |
Planning began in earnest in 1848, a year in which Europe was wracked by revolution and Chartist reformers were active across Britain. The commissioners hoped that their vast essay on the achievements of the nation would encourage loyalty and ensure stability. Connected to these motivations was the desire to present the imperial possessions, which were good for both business and national pride, and which, if shown off effectively, would serve well as propaganda in an international environment. Thus, half of all exhibitors came from Britain and its empire, with the Indian Court at the heart of the imperial exhibits. |
The non-British contingent was perhaps the most striking feature of the Great Exhibition, which can be considered the world's first truly international cultural display because half of its total space was given over to foreign exhibitors. Numerically, these were led by France, followed by the states of northern Germany, Austria, Belgium, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, China, Arabia and Persia. |
Chosen and arranged on stands by the exhibiting manufacturers themselves, the objects shown were classified by the Commission into four exhibit categories reflecting the cycle of production: Raw Materials, Machinery and Mechanical Invention, Manufactures, and Sculpture and Plastic Art. Throughout the Crystal Palace, the air vibrated with the sounds of machines showing how products were manufactured. The latest work in virtually any medium could be found, including arms, ceramics, clocks, fountains, glass, jewelry, leatherwork, lighting, metalwork, mirrors, musical instruments, sculpture, textiles and wallpaper. Although visitors could purchase a guide to find particular areas, exhibitors sought to attract attention by displaying what came to be known as "exhibition pieces"--oversized or highly decorated objects that often demonstrated the varied skills of a firm's entire work force. |
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| The 1851 Great Exhibition Prize Medal, designed by William Wyon. | |
Coveted by exhibitors as much for advertising purposes as for personal fulfilment, 2,918 Prize Medals were awarded for a "certain standard of excellence in production or workmanship." In addition, 170 Council Medals were presented in recognition of some "important novelty of invention or application, either in material or process of manufacture, or originality, combined with great beauty of design." Among the recipients of this more prestigious medal was A.W.N. Pugin, who designed the entire Medieval Court in which his objects appeared. |
Open to all, but accessible only to some
The popularity of the Great Exhibition was extraordinary by standards of the era, welcoming, on average, 42,000 visitors a day. On Tuesday, 7 October 1851, almost 110,000 people came to enjoy the Exhibition over the course of 12 hours; at one point that day 93,000 people were in the building simultaneously. |
Although the Crystal Palace was ostensibly open to all, a basic charge of a shilling prevented a considerable section of British society from attending. Fear of the mob also led to a Hyde Park ban on the vendors who were typically associated with festivals and popular events. Alcohol was forbidden on the site, and police had strategic vantage points from which they could monitor the crowds. Nonetheless, the Exhibition enjoyed a richer social mix than any previous event of such a high cultural order. Contemporary reports tell of trains packed with agricultural laborers in quaint attire led to Hyde Park by their clergymen, Midlands factory workers given leave to glimpse the products of their manufacture displayed in glory, and even peasants who walked across the country to visit the Great Exhibition. The entrepreneur Thomas Cook enhanced his reputation by co-ordinating group visits--an early form of "Cook's tours"--to the Crystal Palace. |
After Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition with much pomp on 1 May 1851, she wrote: "The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings, in the highest good humour ..." Later in May the queen reported: "We went up to the Gallery on the south side and stood at the end of the Transept, to watch the people coming in, in streams ... all so civil and well behaved, that it was quite a pleasure to see them." Only three years after revolutions had shaken the royal foundations of their Continental counterparts, Victoria and Albert had special reason to be satisfied with the public's decorum. |
The Great Exhibition was a turning point in the history of public spectacles because it blended an array of presentation techniques borrowed from other media: Britain's few public museums; the for-profit public entertainment of panoramas (theater-like rooms decorated to evoke other times and places); attractions at London venues such as the Egyptian Hall; the Mechanics Institute exhibitions visited by English artisans; the oversized samples displayed by retailers; commercial art galleries; and the elegant arcades where the well-to-do shopped and socialized. By blending these techniques, the Commission "translated these into exhibitionary forms which, in simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that inspected, were to have a profound and lasting influence on the subsequent development of museums, art galleries, expositions, and department stores." (Bennett, p. 83, "The Exhibitionary Complex" in Thinking About Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, London/New York: Routledge, 1996.) |
The Great Exhibition was the first event in what was to become a spectacular sequence. During the second half of the nineteenth century some 40 international exhibitions were staged worldwide, in cities such as Dublin, Paris, New York, Vienna, Philadelphia, Sydney, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Boston, New Orleans, Calcutta, Antwerp, Barcelona, Chicago, Nashville, Stockholm and Guatemala City. These expositions expanded the scope of the original concept to embrace every aspect of human activity. The successful revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, for example, can be traced to this source. Indeed, the second, third and fourth Olympiads were all held in conjunction with expositions--in Paris, St. Louis and London, respectively. The two nations to take up the exhibition idea most competitively were France and the United States, which, between them, staged some 14 major events before 1900. |
Forebears of the Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition had several direct forebears. First, and perhaps most important, were the activities of the Society of Arts (later decreed the Royal Society of Arts), which, from its founding in 1754, promoted British industry through the use of artistry and invention. Debates, publications and awards were among the tactics the Society employed to encourage every aspect of art and manufacture. In 1760, the Society held what one British historian has called "the first specially organized exhibition of art in this country." Prince Albert was later to become the Society's president, while Henry Cole and many other commissioners were members. The Society's exhibitions in 1847, 1848 and 1849 focused on what might be called industrial arts by showing "Specimens of British Manufactures and Decorative Art," particularly in precious metals. |
While the Society of Arts developed an intellectual and pragmatic agenda that joined art with industry, the French government provided another model in the form of large-scale National Exhibitions of industrial arts, 10 of which were held between 1797 and 1849. Consisting of juried displays by manufacturers of their currently available products, the scale, sales-oriented agenda, and cultural ambition of the French events clearly anticipated the Crystal Palace and all expositions after it. (Cole was tremendously impressed by what he saw at the Paris exhibition in 1849, the same year he launched the Journal of Design and Manufactures.) |
Until the Great Exhibition, so diverse a public had never before participated in so large a spectacle. Although many visitors paid more attention to the Exhibition's sensuous pleasures than to its intended lessons, the success of this ambitious project validated the commissioners' belief (and that of the government that had commissioned them) in displaying objects as a "means" of "promoting Arts, Manufactures and Industry." In 1852 they acted to continue the teaching of taste to manufacturers, artisans, and consumers by establishing the Museum of Manufactures through Cole's leadership of a new government department under the Board of Trade. Here Cole intended to carry on his lifelong quest for rationalization and classification by creating a systematic collection of manufacturers for nationwide reference. |
The origins of the South Kensington Museum
The commissioners used the Exhibition's profits to purchase a large tract of land south of the Crystal Palace. This area of South Kensington, now home to a range of educational and cultural institutions, including the V&A, is still legally owned by the successors to the commissioners of the Great Exhibition. (The Crystal Palace was moved in 1853 to the London suburb of Sydenham, where it was destroyed in a fire in 1936.) |
South Kensington sustained the Crystal Palace spirit of technology and accessibility, becoming the world's first museum with artificial lighting--which made evening visits possible--and with a permanent restaurant situated at the entrance to encourage dining before viewing. More than 6.5 million of the more than 15 million visits to South Kensington between 1857 and 1883 were made in the evenings, when working-class people could come. |
In contrast to the forbidding, neoclassical porticoes of the British Museum and National Gallery, South Kensington's 1869 façade of warmly colored brick and terra cotta beckoned visitors. Approaching the Museum, no one could ignore the pediment's monochrome mosaic depicting Queen Victoria distributing Exhibition medals, surrounded by a silhouette of the Crystal Palace, the names of participating nations, and a railway locomotive. Attendance at the British Museum--where visitors' credentials were still being inspected as late as the 1830s--soared during and after 1851, another indication that the Great Exhibition had generated a broader arts-aware public. (The British Museum did not, however, inaugurate evening hours until 1883.) The patronizing mistrust of the mob evidenced by the commissioners of the Great Exhibition lived on at South Kensington, too: always aware that he was competing with easier pleasures for workers' attention, Cole hoped that "Perhaps the evening opening of Public Museums may furnish a powerful antidote to the gin palace." |
This story is an extract from pages 79-84 of "Industrial Arts and the Exhibition Ideal," by Peter Trippi, in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, edited by Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson, published by V&A Publications. The exhibition "A Grand Design" was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Copyright The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997. |
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