by Gillian Gill
Having secured its site, the commission’s next big headache was the vast structure that would house the exhibits. The members had a design for a solid, conventional brick building, but the estimated cost of just the raw materials exceeded their budget, and the construction was unlikely to be completed by the proposed opening date. Then one of the commissioners had the good luck to run into Joseph Paxton, who was in London for a meeting of the board of the Eastern and Midlands Railway Company. Paxton, like Henry Cole, was a self-made man and an even greater success story. He started as a gardener’s boy attracted the attention of the Duke of Devonshire, became his head gardener, designed and built the famous new conservatory at Chatsworth, and, under the duke’s patronage, became one of Britain’s foremost horticulturalists, landscape architects, and, finally, architects. Along the way, Paxton invested his savings in railway stock and became a rich man.
Hearing of the commission’s building problems, Paxton admitted that he had an idea of his own. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Paxton at his board meeting doodled a design on the blotting paper, and within nine days he had drawn up complete plans. When the commission failed to adopt his design at once, Paxton did an end run around the bureaucrats. He published a sketch of the proposed building in the Illustrated London News, and his design was chosen by public acclaim. People at once took to calling the building the Crystal Palace.
Paxton envisaged a much larger version of the Chatsworth conservatory. It would be a vast, multistoried pavilion, built of prefabricated units of iron and glass, 1,848 feet long by 454 feet wide, tall enough to enclose the great elms in the park, and covering some nineteen acres. Cutting-edge iron production made the Crystal Palace technologically viable. The recent abolition of the tax on glass made it financially sound, though it would take one-third of Great Britain’s total annual production. The structure of each of the units was based on a vast lily pad from the Amazon that Paxton had managed to grow in a heated pool at Chatsworth and christened the Victoria Regia. Amazingly, its fan of intersecting ribs enabled this rare plant to support the weight of a human being.
Construction of Paxton’s glass house proceeded apace, but even intelligent people like the Astronomer Royal feared that it would be unable to withstand vibration. It was at moments like this that the importance of having the Queen’s husband as the chair of the committee became apparent. When the building was up, but before the public had been admitted, Prince Albert arranged for a detachment of soldiers to march up and down the galleries, first in broken cadence, then in lockstep. The glass panes remained intact. Another worry was that with the giant trees of the park roofed into the building, the sparrows would soil both visitors and exhibits. Different solutions for getting rid of the sparrows were touted. Finally the prince consulted his friend the Duke of Wellington. “Sparrow hawks,” His Grace is reputed to have retorted.
PRINCE ALBERT QUITE enjoyed snubbing the High Tories who had proved so hostile not only to himself but to his beloved dead friend Peel. Nonetheless, envisaging his exhibition as a giant demonstration of peace and democracy in action, he ardently wished for the approbation of his peers— members of the royal families of Europe. He urged other monarchs to come to London, share his vision, and offer their congratulations. When all but King Leopold refused to come, Victoria was furious, and Albert took refuge from depression in work.
Whether envious of Britain’s industry or scornful of its prince’s energy, the crowned heads in Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Lisbon, The Hague, Hanover, Munich, and so on would not come to London. They saw armed maniacs at every street corner and feared assassination. The memory of the great revolutions of 1848 was still fresh in royal minds, and London was notoriously the haven for radicals and anarchists of every nation. As the prince wrote to his stepmother: “Just at present I am more dead than alive from overwork. The opponents of the Exhibition work with might and main to throw all the old women into a panic and to drive myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, to proclaim the Red Republic in England.”
To the tsar of Russia, in particular, the whole concept of the exhibition was distasteful and dangerous. In his view, ancient dynasties like his own ruled by divine right, and the creeping democratization preached by Prince Albert and his uncle Leopold had to be stopped at all costs. And so, when Queen Victoria asked the London corps diplomatique to designate a representative to make a speech at the exhibition’s opening ceremony, the Russian ambassador persuaded his fellow ambassadors and ministers to refuse Her Majesty’s offer. Word of this discourtesy inevitably hit the English press, and the English people were incensed against the tsar, whom they regarded, not unreasonably, as a sadistic tyrant. Three years after the end of the Great Exhibition, fierce anti-Russian sentiment in the British people, fostered by the popular press, would catapult Britain into war with Russia in Crimea, against the best judgment of her political leaders.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert particularly counted on the presence at the exhibition’s opening day of their dear friends Prince William, heir to the throne of his brother King Frederick William of Prussia, his wife, Princess Augusta, and their two children. Ever since the birth of the Prince of Wales, for whom he chose the king of Prussia as chief sponsor, Albert had been painstakingly establishing warm relations with the Prussian royal family. In 1848, when Prince William was forced by a revolutionary mob to flee Berlin, he was greeted like a long-lost brother by the English royal family. Victoria and Albert were stunned when, at the eleventh hour, the king of Prussia had second thoughts and forbade his brother to come to England for the exhibition.
Once more Prince Albert put pen to paper and tried to shake His Prussian Majesty out of his fears for his relatives. “Mathematicians have calculated that the Crystal Palace will blow down in the first gale,” wrote the prince in high sarcasm to King Frederick William IV on April 14. “Engineers—that the galleries would crash in and destroy the visitors; political economists have prophesied a scarcity of food in London owing to the vast concourse of people; doctors—that owing to so many races coming in contact with each other, the Black Death of the Middle Ages would make its appearance, as it did after the Crusades; moralists—that England would be infected by all the scourges of the civilised and uncivilised world; theologians—that this second Tower of Babel would draw upon it the vengeance of an offended God. I can give no guarantee against all these perils … but I can promise that the protection from which Victoria and I benefit will be extended to their persons.” Unwilling, perhaps, to be thought a coward by a woman and a mere junior Prince of Coburg, King Frederick William finally allowed his relatives to cross the channel.
The fears voiced by the crowned heads of Europe that they would be assassinated if they came to London were far from fanciful. In 1850 a madman fired a pistol at Queen Victoria as she drove out from the palace, and soon after, another madman hit her on the head with the knob of his cane as she emerged from her uncle Cambridge’s house. Despite these attempts on her life, when it came time to open the Great Exhibition, Queen Victoria refused to show fear.
When she stepped into her open carriage for the drive to the ceremony, she was wearing full court dress of pink and white satin as if for a prorogation of parliament or a levee. Her head, neck, arms, and hands glittered with jewels, she wore ostrich feathers in her hair, and on her bosom was pinned the Koh-i-Noor, then the largest diamond in the world, all 191 carats of it. A better target could hardly be imagined, especially when the sun came out just as the Queen drove up to the Crystal Palace, her diamonds echoing the brilliant flash of the glass. Some seven hundred thousand people had gathered to see the royal party drive by, but not a shot was fired. Those vast crowds of ordinary citizens whom foreign kings regarded with such suspicion proved to be Victoria’s best bodyguard.
In the vast central transept of the Crystal Palace, twenty-five thousand invited guests were waiting. The Queen stood silent under a h
uge canopy close to the central fountain, smiling in evident pleasure, and allowing her husband to do the talking. As she recorded in her diary a few hours later, she felt even more proud and humble than on the day of her coronation. Everything was perfect, just as Albert had planned it. The exhibition was sure to be a huge success. How pleasant to see the discomfort of those nasty ambassadors who had refused to take part in the ceremony.
After the exhibition was declared officially open in the Queen’s name, a Chinese gentleman in his native costume suddenly walked forward and prostrated himself in front of Victoria. Since there was a small Chinese exhibit but no official Chinese representative, the man was allowed to bring up the end of the procession of foreign notables. Only later was it established that he was a mere commercial agent, not some visiting dignitary. The unrehearsed juxtaposition of this unknown foreigner and the English Queen was a perfect symbol of the cultural phenomenon that would be the Great Exhibition of 1851.
At the end of the opening ceremony, Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus was sung by a choir of six hundred, accompanied by the biggest organ in the world and an orchestra of two hundred. The sound was almost lost in the huge structure. The Queen returned home in a kind of ecstasy. “The tremendous cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains … and my beloved husband the author of this ‘Peace Festival,’ which united the industry of all nations of the earth,—all this was moving indeed … God bless my dearest Albert, God bless my dearest country, which has shown itself so great today.”
QUEEN VICTORIA DID not visit the Crystal Palace only on opening day in full regalia. She had already visited it twice before the opening, and she went repeatedly thereafter, bringing her children and her guests. She was sure that no one enjoyed the Great Exhibition as much as she did, but a great many people came close. Prince Albert and his commission had conceived of the exhibit as a boost to industry and commerce and as a tool for educating the masses. In the end, their exhibition proved to be a fabulous success because it was fun for all kinds of people. The eighty-three-year-old Duke of Wellington, tiny, stone deaf, and tottery on his pins, was mesmerized by the exhibits, which included a larger-than-life statue of himself. Equally delighted was Mary Kerlynack, an elderly Cornish woman who walked seven hundred miles to buy her ticket and got to tell her story to the Queen and the press. As Victoria herself noted: “The immense crowd of manufacturers with whom we have spoken have gone away delighted. The thousands who are in the Crystal Palace, when we are leaving, are all so loyal, and so grateful, never having seen us before. All of this will be of use not to be described. It identifies us with the people.”
Word of the wonders of the exhibition spread like wildfire, and the new railways made London accessible as never before. Newspapers all over the world had pictures and articles and firsthand reports. Friends wrote to friends, either urging them to come or begging for a bed. William Makepeace Thackeray published a long and sentimental poem. It ended:
March, Queen and Royal pageant, march
By splendid aisle and springing arch
Of this fair Hall!
And see! Above the fabric vast
God’s boundless heaven is bending blue,
God’s peaceful sun is beaming through
And shining over all.
The cartoonists for the magazine Punch had five months of superb material, foreign and homegrown. London theaters closed for want of clients, and the streets of Manchester and other great industrial towns were reported, with patriotic hyperbole, to be empty.
The exhibition had something for everyone, and everyone was invited. One of the organizing committee’s strokes of genius was to institute a price system that differed from day to day. For wealthy families there were season tickets for three guineas and a pound. Some days a day ticket cost five shillings, some days, one shilling. On a few days, entry was free. If you could not afford the price of admission, it was fun just to go to Hyde Park, which had become the people’s park. For free you could walk around the magnificent new gardens, make fun of the foreigners, admire the flags of the nations fluttering atop the great pavilion, ooh and aah when suddenly the 12,000 fountains sprang into the air circulating 120,000 gallons of water, scrutinize the prince’s model working-class home (improbably complete with piped water, water closet, kitchenette, and separate rooms for the children), and watch the fireworks at night.
Inside the Crystal Palace, there was far too much to see in a single day. A young toff who had never worked in his life could tour a suspiciously clean, quiet, and spacious working cotton mill or a replica lead mine, minus the toxic dust. Art lovers who had never ventured across the seas saw replicas of some of the world’s greatest statues as well as original works commissioned for the event, such as the controversial statue of a bare-breasted Amazon on horseback. (Queen Victoria really liked it.) Men of business could see what their competitors in France and the United States had to offer. Housewives could examine silks from India and China, printed cottons from Egypt and France, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, pianos, indoor plants, pump organs, doorknobs, and a delirious array of knickknacks. There were inventions of all kinds: electric telegraphs, coffee roasters, clocks, musical instruments, fire engines, locomotives, a steam-powered sugar cane crushing machine, and the handgun with a revolving cylinder recently perfected by Samuel Colt. There were geological samples and botanical specimens, a stuffed dodo, a stuffed elephant complete with howdah, the ivory throne of the Rajah of Travancore, and dinosaur models reconstructed from fossil remains. At times the vast central transept became an arena, variously featuring a circus, a military band, or an orchestra.
As the Punch cartoonists pointed out, the exhibition brought together illiterate farm workers in smocks, smart young men about town, and neatly starched bank clerks. The sheer size of the building and the number of visitors encouraged a certain degree of social license. Young ladies happily lost sight of their mamas in the crowd and met up with young gentlemen in Messrs. Schweppes’s refreshment rooms. Wives abandoned their husbands to the tender mercies of the Irish help and met friends for lunch at the exhibition. Middle-class parents from the provinces turned up at the Crystal Palace with all the children and a bag of sandwiches. Working-class families on a spree tasted ice cream and Jell-O for the first time and were not sure they liked them. Tradesmen abandoned their normal line of work and turned to catering for the tourists.
During its five and a half months, 6.2 million tickets were sold to the Great Exhibition, an unprecedented number given that the entire population of Great Britain at the time was about 20 million. On a single day in July, 72,000 people poured through the doors, all seeking entertainment and illumination, all needing bathroom facilities and transportation. The vast catalog was a best seller. Between the ticket booths, the shop, and the cafes, over a half million pounds changed hands. At the end, when all the bills had been paid, the organizing committee found itself with a profit of 186,000 pounds and decided to use it for the purchase of seventy acres in Kensington. On this site in due time would rise the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Victorians called it Albertopolis.
The political classes throughout Europe in 1851 were amazed by the Great Exhibition in London. Here was liberal democracy in action. The massive crowds were calm, orderly, and patient, though only fifty policemen, armed with wooden clubs, stood by to keep the peace. It seemed that no one made a scene, no one got trampled, no one was arrested, no one was assassinated, no one threw stones. Thunder and lightning did not smash the great glass house into smithereens. Sparrow droppings did not land on the buttered buns. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the Queen put on show in the British section, was returned to her without incident. And the building was pulled down as swiftly as it was put up, carted off to the then outer London suburb of Sydenham, reassembled, and made even bigger. How extraordinary!
The exhibition did not draw everyone�
�s praise. The political theorists Karl Marx and Thomas Carlyle, who agreed on very little else, were among the few middle-class men who turned their noses up at this capitalist extravaganza. English cabinet ministers and many members of parliament visited the exhibition, as did courtiers who needed the royal favor, but by and large the aristocracy and landed gentry held off. People who habitually traveled abroad did not need to see copies of Greek sculptures or stuffed elephants. Great landowners had no use for pipe organs and no interest in baroque telegraph machines or barometers made of leeches. For the Tories in parliament, the Great Exhibition was one more reason to dislike the prince consort.
By definition, the Crystal Palace was not an exclusive venue. Even on a five-shilling day, the exhibition was the most atrocious crush, and one could never be certain whom one might bump into. If beer was not served in the refreshment rooms, neither was wine, and warm lemonade and stale ham sandwiches were not everyone’s treat. If the Queen cared to look like a little middle-class frump and hobnob with the unwashed, that was entirely her own affair. If the prince cared to spend his life working on committees with ill-bred upstarts like Henry Cole and Thomas Cubitt, let him. Even as the ties binding the ordinary British man and woman to the royal family were strengthened, the isolation of the Queen and the prince and their family from the English aristocracy also deepened.
WHEN THE GREAT Exhibition closed, Prince Albert was intensely relieved but too tired and sad to feel triumphant. He had recently and unexpectedly lost his two closest English friends: his private secretary George Anson, only thirty-nine, and Sir Robert Peel. Anson, Albert told Victoria, was “almost like a brother,” Peel “a second father.” The frantic months of activity that preceded the opening of the exhibition left Albert so “weak and fagged” that he could barely eat or sleep. He was never the same man again.
