by Simon Schama
The fiercest critics of the machine age also routinely cast it as the enemy of nature. The true Merrie England, they said, was the village green, the cosy cottage and the benevolent squire. But when the members of the royal commission that had been set up to organize the exhibition, with Prince Albert at its head, picked May Day as opening day they knew what they were doing.
Their chosen architect, who had not submitted designs for the original competition, was the young, but well-connected landscape designer Joseph Paxton whose own career – as both greenhouse designer and board member of the Midland Railway – exemplified the easy fit between horticulture and industrialism. (He had doodled the first sketch of the building in a bored moment at a railway board meeting.) So when the proposed siting in Hyde Park was attacked, especially by Colonel Charles Sibthorp, MP for Lincoln and a truculent enemy of all things modern, as a ‘tubercle’ on the lungs of London, Paxton rose to the challenge. He raised and bent the framing ribs of the ‘transept’ to form a semicircular roof enclosing the two ancient 90-foot elms whose impending destruction Sibthorp had made the test case of the ‘humbug’ exhibition’s expensive vandalism. Instead of being casualties of the show, the elms were now its green presiding guardians, offering extra shade (along with the fabric awnings) to anyone sweating in the glassy humidity, and a promise that the industrial future need not sound the death knell for the British landscape.
If nature and industry, the bees and the glass hive, could be reconciled, so could other perennial antagonists: science and religion; aristocracy and enterprise; technology and the Christian tradition. The membership of the royal commission over which Prince Albert presided had been thoughtfully composed so as to include all possible cultural constituencies other than protectionists. There were entrepreneurial aristocrats like Francis Egerton, the Earl of Ellesmere, and the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry; free-trade politicians like William Gladstone and Richard Cobden; a Gothic Revival architect, Charles Barry, who had designed the new Palace of Westminster; and a self-made developer, Sir William Cubitt. There was room both for the founding force of the National Gallery, Charles Lock Eastlake, and for the President of the Geological Society, Sir Charles Lyell, whose own work had thrown serious doubt on the literal truth of the Book of Genesis. The driving spirit of the show, who had persuaded Albert to lend his patronage, was the extraordinary Henry Cole, who had been the editor of the Journal of Design and Manufactures between 1849 and 1852, and had produced the first commercial Christmas cards and the first sets of children’s building blocks. Cole may have started with the idea that the exhibition would be a showcase for the best of British design (he himself had created a famous all-white Minton tea service); but by the time it was finished, he and Prince Albert shared a more messianic vision. The Great Exhibition would not be just a grand national and international bazaar; it would be a template for the peaceful future. Carried away by his personal mission, and encouraged by Cobden, Albert had already thought – out loud during an extraordinary speech at a banquet in York for the Lord Mayor of London on 25 October 1850 – that the post-exhibition world would be an indivisible human community of growers, makers, and, not least, happy shoppers. In such a world, war between states would become an anachronistic absurdity, replaced by the peaceful competition of commerce. Shows like the Great Exhibition would be the alternative to the military parades of martinet autocracies.
Machinery, which had been depicted by the fearful and the ignorant as a Moloch, delivering humanity into its maw and spitting them out again as labour units of the profit calculus, without regard for the communities, the families and the individual lives it had devoured, would now be seen as socially and morally benevolent. At this precise moment, when the word ‘Victorian’ entered the English language, another word, ‘industry’, did a semantic somersault, conveying henceforth not the expenditure, but the saving of physical labour. Together the two spelled a third of the age’s favourite doctrine: progress. The big machines themselves, brightly burnished and hissing odourless steam, mesmerized the crowds, who stood for hours watching them from behind crimson ropes. Broad-gauge locomotives like the Great Western’s green giant The Lord of the Isles, capable of generating 1000 horse-power, were ogled as friendly Titans, not least because the railways had been crucial in accomplishing the professed objective of the exhibition: to bring Britons, divided by both class and geography, together. Of the 6 million-plus visitors who came to see the Exhibition during the six months it was open, from May to October, at least three-quarters of a million came by railway train. Transport on this scale had hitherto been achieved only at times of military mobilization, by armies on the march and civilians fleeing from their advance. But the greatest mass movement of population to this point in all of British history was entirely peaceful; the triumph, not of state power, but of curiosity and commerce. Excursions, including lodging, were organized by Thomas Cook, and visitors from relatively humble backgrounds, the ‘respectable working class’, could take advantage of a special cut-price admission. Hundreds of thousands did.
There had been other industrial exhibitions. Embarrassingly, it had been Napoleonic France that had invented the genre. But this was the first time that an entire nation was redefined by a trade show. Let tinpot tyrants parade their hussars and their field cannon. The workshop of the world would boast Nasmyth’s steam hammer. ‘These, England’s triumphs are’, wrote Thackeray in his May Day ode to the Exhibition in 1850, ‘the trophies of a bloodless war.’
So the Great Exhibition was meant to dispel virtually all the social and political nightmares of mid-19th-century Britain, replacing isolation by commercial connection. But would the classes of Britain itself be quite so harmoniously reconciled? The poetic pieties were doubtless all very nice, thought the octogenarian Duke of Wellington, still the commander of the London garrison, but they were no substitute for guns and cavalry to keep the dangerous rabble at bay. Wellington believed that 15,000 troops at a minimum were needed, along with an overpowering display of police, to safeguard the metropolis. He was still haunted by the narrow escape of spring and summer 1848, when London had been the scene of mass Chartist demonstrations for political equality, threatening to spread the revolutionary contagion that had overthrown governments from Paris to Rome and Vienna. But three years later there were no bloody barricades; only the patient queue for the turnstiles.
The prospect of masses of the great unwashed freely mingling with the quality in what was already, at 2 million, the most populous city the world had ever seen worried guardians of order like Wellington. Never mind the piety of spreading peace among nations, the active encouragement of foreigners to visit London for the Exhibition seemed criminally irresponsible. Bearded revolutionaries (their full whiskers thought to be an unmistakable sign of political deviance) would be stalking the streets of Kensington in the guise of innocent tourists. Surveillance and containment would stretch to breaking point. Prince Albert was only half joking when he wrote that
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, murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes and to swallow up those for whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am held responsible.
But both Albert and Paxton stood their ground. Because of the attempts that had been made on her life (four in the 1840s) it was assumed that the queen would be given a private tour of the exhibition by the prince on opening day before the public was let in. But as far as Albert was concerned, if the exhibition was to be a demonstration of the unique virtues of the constitutional monarchy it was essential that the queen be seen in the midst of her loyal subjects. Against the objection that ill-intentioned parties might insinuate themselves among the ranks of the respectable, the bolder Albertian view prevailed. Dignit
aries dominated the proceedings on 1 May, which included a blessing pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury that gave the terms ‘nave’ and ‘transept’ used for the building an odour of authentic sanctity. But Victoria made a point of walking round the displays – including Mr Milton’s glass beehive – and she would come back with the family 13 times before it closed.
Paxton’s views about the populism of the event were even more audacious. His proposal to make admission free after the end of May was greeted with incredulous horror. But his insistence (shared by Cole and Prince Albert) that the Great Exhibition was the best possible display of the British ‘third way’, neither republican nor autocratic, extended to arguing that bringing working people into the Palace would soften, not sharpen, their sense of separateness from the ruling classes. It would show them the cushily upholstered future waiting for the thrifty and industrious – the worker bees of the Workshop of the World. Soothed by the spectacle, they would be transformed from agitators into consumers. The result was that a compromise was struck. After 26 May, admission would be set at one shilling from Tuesdays to Thursdays, with even cheaper season tickets for women. On the first ‘shilling day’ 37,000 people came to the Palace. Subsequently the number averaged between 45,000 and 65,000 a day. No revolutionary hordes materialized. In fact, over the six months of the exhibition’s life not a single act of vandalism was reported. By October 1851, between 90,000 and 100,000 were coming every day. As The Times rightly reported, ‘the People have now become the Exhibition’.
The first great British show of the 19th century was defined, above all, as a family outing – starting with the royal family. There is no doubt that, had the Great Exhibition not been her husband’s pet project, it would have been considerably less likely to have aroused so much of Victoria’s enthusiasm. But she believed it to have been emphatically his creation (poor Henry Cole would never emerge from the long shadow of that myth) and 1 May 1851 was, for Victoria, primarily the product of Albert’s persevering benevolence. She responded, too, to the prince’s strong conviction that the exhibition should be a vision of domestic Britain, strengthened, rather than stressed, by its industrial transformation. The overstuffed displays of home fabrics and furniture, dinner plates and nursery toys, pianos and cast-iron garden seats all seemed to translate the picture of Britain’s economic power into a middle-class idyll. The royal family’s personal memento of the occasion was not the ceremonial views so much as the artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s family group called The First of May (1851), depicting the scene when the old Duke of Wellington, on his own 82nd birthday, came to bring a present to his godson, the one-year-old Prince Arthur, on his. In the background of this modern Adoration of the Magus holy sunbeams bathe the Crystal Palace.
It went without saying that this sunlit bourgeois future would also warm the chillier prospects of the British working class. Or so Prince Albert hoped. Encouraged by Thomas Bazley, the Manchester businessman who prided himself on the benevolent treatment of his workers – and who seems to have invented Friday paydays – the Prince Consort set himself to think how the exhibition could give some momentum to redesigning the domestic lives of working people for better health and comfort. As President of the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes, he commissioned Henry Roberts to build a gabled, two-storey, four-unit model apartment house for working families. Built from hollow bricks to reduce the price, these dwellings incorporated tall windows for maximum light and a central staircase for better ventilation, and could be extended through modular replication, either horizontally or vertically. The show houses were erected in Hyde Park beside the exhibition and, after it was over, dismantled and rebuilt on Kennington Common (significantly the site of the Chartist demonstrations) where they still stand, albeit in woebegone condition.
Decades later, in the 1880s, emerging, just a peek, from her widow’s shrouds, Victoria too would also interest herself in the housing of the poor. Shocked by published reports on the slums of London, and doubtless moved by a conviction that it was what Albert the Good would have wanted, she wrote to Gladstone’s government urging them to turn their attention to the problem, and her benevolent nagging resulted in a royal commission. The issue was important to the queen because she subscribed to the contemporary liberal commonplace that if industrial Britain had proved uniquely stable in a world of war and revolution, it was due not just to the political, but also to the social, constitution with which the country was blessed. That constitution rested on the moral bedrock of family life of which the queen was the chief exemplar, as wife, then bereft widow and, always, mother. She was, in fact, the first British sovereign–mother; although often, in her 64-year reign, the paradox gave her no joy – she fretted that her duty to be a good woman ‘amiable and domestic’ was at odds with both her character and her duty to reign, especially in an empire where so much emphasis was placed on the ideal of Christian manliness.
But then Victoria believed that this dilemma was, to some extent or other, also the lot of her sex. She felt that all over Britain there must have been countless good daughters, wives and mothers, torn between their obligation to be the ‘angel at the hearth’ (in the poet Coventry Patmore’s famously sentimental poem ‘The Angel in the House’, 1854) and the unforgiving necessities of daily life: children to be nursed; work to be done; tables to be laid; prayers to be said. And the mother–queen flattered herself, even when she was immured at Windsor or Osborne or wrapped up in the bracing world of Highland ‘Balmorality’, that she understood the condition of Britain’s women; the burden of their duty and the weight of their fortitude.
But did she?
In the autumn of 1832 the 13-year-old Princess Victoria, en route to Wales, had her first glimpse of industrial Britain. The visits to a cotton mill at Belper and a school at Bangor, where she laid the foundation stone, were carefully orchestrated to disarm the hostility of the ‘labouring classes’ and symbolize the union between the future sovereign and the ordinary people. Who could hate a rosebud? But somewhere near Birmingham, Victoria’s coach rolled through coal country and she saw something deeply un-English: black grass. She wrote in her journal:
The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines, flaming coals, in abundance every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and little ragged children.
The naivety of this wide-eyed picture of a British inferno is hardly surprising. The whole purpose of Victoria’s upbringing to this point had been isolation. After her father, the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, had died on 23 January 1820, eight months after her birth on 24 May 1819, she was brought up almost entirely in the company of women: a small, stuffy world dominated by her mother the duchess (in whose room she slept) and her governess Baroness Lehzen, and riddled with petty court and family intrigues. At Kensington Palace, Victoria was to be fenced off from squalor and wickedness, otherwise known as King George IV and his successor King William IV, her uncles. In an age in which Evangelical fervour had taken hold, not just of the middle classes but of a significant part of the aristocracy too, the purity and piety of the heiress presumptive were touted as a desperately needed correction for a monarchy badly compromised by scandal. The queen–saviour was intended to have been George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte Augusta, whose virtue and liberal intelligence were supposed to give the raddled monarchy a fresh start. But, to genuine and unforced national grief, she had died in childbirth. Her widower (who was also Victoria’s mother’s brother and thus her uncle twice over), Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later king of the Belgians, obviously saw the little princess as Charlotte’s natural successor; he passed on advice books, and began to tutor her as he would have done his wife. ‘O
ur times are hard for royalty,’ he wrote to her when she was just 13, ‘never was there a period when the existence of real qualities in persons of high station has been more imperiously called for.’
It was the truth. When George III had died in 1820, his passing had been marked by genuine sorrow for an endearingly simple man. Although in later years he was blind and behaved as if mad, he was always thought to have understood the hardships of the humble as well as, if not better than, the pomp of the mighty. But when George IV was lowered into the vault at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1830 (by undertakers who were drunk), while his successor, his brother King William, made a scene of himself by chatting noisily throughout the funeral service, it was a demise conspicuous for its lack of regret, much less grief. Massively bloated and terminally debauched, George IV and his excesses had seemed to moral critics like Hazlitt and Cobbett especially offensive at a time when so many, in both the countryside and industrial towns, were in dire want. When, at the time of his coronation, he had had the doors of Westminster Abbey locked against his wife, the estranged Queen Caroline, and then had her tried for adulterous treason, violent rioters had shouted support for her cause.
William IV’s contribution to the monarchy’s public standing was not much more auspicious. In contrast to his elder brother, the famous bluff simplicity of the sailor king – he had served for decades in the Royal Navy – went down well. But the new king squandered much of that popularity by his entrenched and publicly declared opposition to parliamentary reform. It did not, moreover, go unnoticed that, while he had no surviving legitimate children, he had no fewer than 15 illegitimate ones – a record for the British monarchy. Perhaps it was because she was scandalized by the king’s insistence on keeping company with his current mistress, the actress Mrs Jordan, that the Duchess of Kent went out of her way to forbid Victoria his company (although the girl seems to have been personally quite fond of her uncle). The duchess was certainly concerned to keep the priceless political capital of Victoria’s moral, as well as physical, virginity intact. But she also bitterly resented what she thought the king’s niggardly refusal to grant her what she thought her proper share of the civil list.
