The Great Exhibition Vol 1

A Documentary History

Geoffrey Cantor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000559675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the outstanding public event of the Victorian era. Housed in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, it presented a vast array of objects, technologies and works of art from around the world. The sources in this edition provide a depth of context for study into the Exhibition.

I. ORGANIZING THE EXHIBITION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112877-1

This section engages the administrative history of the Exhibition and consists primarily of documents created by the Society of Arts and, after its formation in January 1850, the Royal Commission, its committees and its servants, and also newspaper reports of public meetings held in support of the Exhibition. Albert and the Commission generated an immense bureaucracy which deserves to stand alongside other large bureaucratic undertakings by the Victorians, such as the 1851 census organized by the General Register Office. The paperwork generated by the Commission was immense. Thus several months after the Exhibition closed the Commission issued its First Report, which included an appendix listing the ‘Printed Papers Illustrative of the Operations of the Royal Commission, the Executive, Finance, Building, Local, and other Committees in Carrying out the Business of the Exhibition’. The list cited 1,133 items, more than half of which pre-dated the opening. But as the list included only printed material, it omitted the vast majority of the correspondence generated by the Commission, its members and its several committees. For example, the Executive Committee alone received approximately 31,000 letters and sent out 73,000 letters and circulars in the period before the opening. ¹ Although the documents in this section provide an inevitably limited account of the Exhibition, they portray many of the main developments leading up to the completion of the Crystal Palace and its opening on 1 May 1851.

At the centre of the organizational structure was the workaholic Prince Albert, who was involved in planning and sometimes implementing almost every aspect of the Exhibition, and the other twenty-two Royal Commissioners. The Commission met on fifty-four occasions and was aided by two secretaries and an assistant secretary. However, much of the day-to-day administration devolved onto the Executive Committee, chaired by the meteorologist and Royal Engineer Col. William Reid and including Henry Cole, Charles Wentworth Dilke, Francis Fuller and the secretary, Matthew Digby Wyatt. Among its responsibilities, the Executive Committee assigned duties to a large support staff, including clerks, policemen, firemen, receivers of goods in each of the thirty classes, super-intendents of the refreshment rooms, and general superintendents responsible for different parts of the building. Many of these positions were filled by men drafted in from the Corps of Royal Engineers and the Royal Sappers and Miners. ²

Five respectable gentlemen were appointed as treasurers to the Commission, who were responsible for managing the income and expenditure, but financial issues were discussed and resolved by the ten-man Finance Committee, chaired by Earl Granville. Specific issues were the responsibility of committees dedicated to supervising the design and construction of the Crystal Palace (namely the Build-ing Committee, which held thirty-eight meetings), the contract with the builder, the catalogue, the price of admissions and the production of medals, while a separate committee was responsible for the inscriptions that appeared on the medals. Latterly there was also a committee to recommend how the surplus should be spent. A further four committees were responsible for each of the four sections into which the exhibits were to be divided - raw materials, machinery, manufactures and the fine arts. The juries for each of the thirty classes of exhibit constituted a further thirty committees, and the chairmen of all the juries together formed the Council of Chairmen, which was chaired by Viscount Canning. ³ The construction of the building inevitably required large numbers of labourers, artisans and other workers, including the employees of the contractor, Fox & Henderson, who numbered at least 2,000 during the peak construction periods. Offsite an average of 152 compilers, compositors, operatives, indexers, etc. produced the Exhibition catalogues at the printing works of Messrs Clowes and Sons.

Throughout the country over 300 Local Committees were formed to raise subscriptions for the Exhibition, liaise with the local population, encourage manufacturers to submit exhibits and determine the space within the Crystal Palace to be allotted to exhibits sent from each locality. To assist their work in advancing the cause of the Exhibition, a raft of about 450 Local Commissioners were appointed. Given the immense size of this national organization, two Special Commissioners were appointed with the task of communicating with Local Committees. Moreover, a further committee was responsible for liaising between the twenty-one Local Committees that represented different parts of the metropolis. As befitted an international exhibition, a large cohort of Foreign Commissioners was appointed to promote the Exhibition in other countries, although in some cases this role was performed by organizations such as the Polytechnic Society of Munich. Foreign Commissioners also participated in other aspects of the Exhibition such as serving on juries and representing their countries at the opening ceremony.

Little of this immense organizational structure could have been envisaged in the summer of 1849. Henry Cole and the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt had recently returned from the Paris exhibition, and Cole in particular was enthused by the vision of a large international exhibition of manufactures in London that, he believed, would inaugurate a period of international peace and prosperity. He initially discussed this proposal with Wyatt and the naval engineer John Scott Russell, and Prince Albert was also soon approached. On 30 June 1849 Cole, Russell, Francis Fuller and the building contractor Thomas Cubitt met Albert at Osborne House, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight. There the basic plan was proposed and further elaborated over the coming weeks. Developments moved fast and in many different directions. Cole, Fuller, Russell and others began to travel the country in order to gauge the reaction of the manufacturing districts and, should it prove favourable, to use that feedback to justify the need for an exhibition. Secondly, subscriptions were sought from manufacturers and others. Most importantly, this funding drive expanded to include a meeting on 17 October at the Mansion House - the residence of the Lord Mayor of London - at which Cole wooed London’s powerful financial community and gained considerable support for the scheme. Thirdly, a contractor was sought to construct the building. Several of those approached declined, but Messrs James and George Munday agreed to undertake the work, and on 23 August a contract was drawn up between the Mundays and the Society of Arts. That the Mundays were also willing to advance a substantial sum for prizes added to the attractiveness of their proposal. ⁴

The first three documents in this section relate to the emerging public face of the proposed exhibition during the closing months of 1849 as members of the Society of Arts travelled the country. In the Report by Messrs Cole and Fuller on the Views of Manufacturers and Others Regarding Periodic Exhibitions the authors summarized the reactions they encountered and confirmed the high level of support for the prospective exhibition. ⁵ The civic discussion initiated by the mayor of Ipswich on Thursday, 25 October, has been selected as an example of a local meeting, while a newspaper report of that meeting forms the second document, below. The third document is an account of Cole’s successful appeal to merchants, bankers and traders of the City of London who had gathered in the Mansion House on 17 October and who passed motions supporting both the Exhibition and its funding by voluntary contributions.

Following the Mansion House meeting on 17 October, Albert raised with Cole the need to form a Royal Commission to take control of a project that increasingly looked too unwieldy to be steered by the Society of Arts. Included below (pp. 63-74) is Victoria’s warrant published in the London Gazette on 4 January 1850 that created the Commission and named its members.

While some degree of continuity exists between the early stages of the project under the aegis of the Society of Arts and the organization headed by the Commissioners, the Commissioners had to repudiate some of the decisions made earlier by the Society of Arts. The two most significant were the rejection of the very large premiums for the winning entries that the Society of Arts had widely advertised and the termination of the building contract with Messrs Munday. Although the contract with Messrs Munday had been drawn up nearly four months earlier, its content was only publicized in the middle of December when a report appeared in The Times - this forms the fourth document in this section. As the minutes of the Commission’s first two meetings show (below, pp. 71-86), its members rapidly began to grapple with the problems of mounting the Exhibition and, in particular, of abrogating the Munday contract. As the Commissioners were responsible for mounting the Exhibition, including the construction of an appropriate building, their remit included decision making about numerous different aspects of the project. The minutes of their regular meetings therefore provide an administrative lens through which to view this immense enterprise. Thus, although the Commission received reports from various committees, its minutes, which are framed in terse language, provide an administrator’s overview of the Exhibition.

The next four documents trace the progressive attempts to win support for the Exhibition, especially in London. On 25 January 1850 a second meeting was held in the Mansion House in order to promote the Exhibition more widely in the City of London and, most importantly, to attract subscriptions from this wealthy sector. However, by this time a groundswell of opposition to the Exhibition had arisen, led by the Tory protectionist press but increasingly encompassing other issues, some of which will be explored in the documents in the second section. Partly in response to this opposition, a lavish formal banquet was held at the Mansion House on 21 March, attended by the Commissioners, foreign ambassadors, members of Parliament, prominent manufacturers and financiers, leading members of the scientific community and more than a hundred mayors from across the country (see below, pp. 125-45). Held in the ornately decorated Egyptian Hall, this banquet provided Albert with the opportunity to present his vision of the Exhibition to this highly influential audience. It was now portrayed as Albert’s Exhibition, and his rallying call to the British people - indeed, the world - aimed at uniting them in support of his plan, irrespective of their social, political and religious differences.

The report of another meeting deserves attention. The Commissioners received a petition from the citizens of Westminster requesting that the plans for the Exhibition be explained to them. A public meeting was therefore convened at Willis’s Rooms on the morning of Thursday, 21 February (see below, pp. 103-24). In contrast to the formal events at the Mansion House, this was an open meeting and not limited to invited guests. Moreover, none of the Commissioners was among the principal speakers; instead, the meeting was addressed by the Earl of Carlisle, the Bishops of London and Oxford and ambassadors from France, Prussia and America. These and other speakers generated considerable enthusiasm for the Exhibition, and the full text of the speech by the Bishop of Oxford, ‘On the Dignity of Labour’, was subsequently printed as a tract and is reproduced here.

Although Albert continued to garner public support, in the spring and early summer of 1850 there was also increasing opposition to the Commission’s proposals and especially to the plan to locate the Exhibition in Hyde Park. The potential destruction of the elm trees in the Park caused outrage in some circles, and this one issue was accorded great symbolic significance especially by the wealthy householders of the neighbourhood. The announcement in mid-June by the Building Committee of its plan for an immense brick structure (see below, p. 149) only added to the tide of opposition. In order to respond to the mounting public concern, justify their own authority and explain the case for holding the Exhibition in Hyde Park, the Commissioners draw up a forcefully argued memorandum, dated 1 July 1850 (see below, pp. 151-65). On 4 July the issue was discussed in both chambers of Parliament. On the evening before these debates, Albert confided his concern to a trusted adviser: ‘I cannot conceal from you that we are on the point of having to abandon the Exhibition altogether. We have announced our intention to do so, if on the day the vast building ought to be begun the site is taken from us. Peel [who had died on 2 July] was to have taken charge of the business of the Lower House. It is to come to the vote to-morrow, and the public is inflamed by the newspapers to madness’. ⁶ However, the motion opposing the building of the Exhibition in Hyde Park failed in the Commons by a substantial majority (see below, pp. 167-94), and a similar motion was withdrawn at the end of the debate in the Lords.

The last three documents in this section focus on the creation of the Exhibition and especially the Crystal Palace. One crucial development was Paxton’s proposal for a building of iron and glass, which became the highly acclaimed Crystal Palace. Paxton was an effective self-publicist who enjoyed recounting how he had developed his design that captivated the public imagination and rescued the Exhibition from almost certain failure. In a speech delivered at a dinner held in his honour in Derby on 4 August 1851, Paxton provided his own heroic account of how he came to design the Crystal Palace (see below, pp. 195-206).

The final two items were published in the first part of ODIC and were thus available to visitors to the Exhibition. Indeed, they were widely viewed as providing the official history and rationale for the Exhibition. The first is Cole’s introductory essay which recounted the story of how the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• List of Abbreviations
• Organizing the Exhibition
• Reactions to the Proposed Exhibition
• Editorial Notes
• Silent Corrections
• List of Sources