Kriegel on Auerbach

Jeffrey Auerbach sets out to quash triumphal narratives of the Great Exhibition that have surrounded the event from its inception through the twentieth century. He maintains that contemporary journalistic accounts and historical monographs alike have attributed to the Exhibition a sort of “whiggish inevitability” (1). The Exhibition and the Crystal Palace that housed it have served as the most palpable symbols of the mid-nineteenth century liberal consensus, the rise of the middle classes, and the triumph of Britain’s first industrial revolution for the historical imagination in its popular and academic guises alike. Rather than the emblem of these successes, however, Auerbach argues that the Exhibition was a “battleground in which different groups within Victorian society fought to present their vision of what sort of nation Britain should be” (3). He charts the Exhibition’s career, with its contentious founding, popular appeal, and spectacular displays, by looking to a range of sources, including the minutes of the Royal Commission, local records such as those of the Royal Manchester Institution, catalogues, newspapers, and prints. The resulting narrative portrays the Exhibition as a contest over liberalism and its attendant projects of free trade, representation, industry, and nation-building. By framing the Exhibition in such a way, Auerbach provides empirical grist for Paul Greenhalgh’s assertion that worlds’ fairs between 1851 and 1914 were “saturated with Liberal ideology” (Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 27).

Auerbach proceeds through three sections — “Making,” “Meaning, and “Memory” — that chart the Exhibition’s emergence, analyze its displays, and delineate its legacies. “Making” is an intricate political and social history that chronicles the contests over the Exhibition’s formation. The most compelling section of the book, it effectively links the struggles around the Exhibition to the consolidation of liberal England. The constituency of the Royal Commission, Auerbach notes, was a “microcosm” of the political forces that would come together with the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859 (31). His evocative primary research chronicles the efforts by this Commission to sell the Exhibition to England’s provinces — a process that involved producing manifold meanings around the event and harnessing such engines of publicity as meetings, speeches, and posters. The Commissioners were particularly successful in liberal, dissenting, manufacturing and commercial areas — Manchester, Bradford, and Liverpool among them. They were less so in radical enclaves like London’s Tower Hamlets or such Tory, agricultural and protectionists centers as Durham and Kent, not to mention in the rural reaches of Wales and Ireland. As he recounts the varied responses to the Exhibition, Auerbach evokes a nation with a nuanced political, economic, and social topography.

Auerbach sustains the theme of unevenness in the second section, “Meaning,” which employs the Exhibition as a lens through which to understand contemporary contests over class, commerce, culture, and nation. He effectively uses the Exhibition’s displays to echo revisionist scholarship on the industrial revolution that argued for the persistence of artisanal and agricultural labor. Like Annie Coombes’ Reinventing Africa (Yale University Press, 1994) and Patricia Morton’s Hybrid Modernities (MIT Press, 2000), Auerbach’s monograph portrays world’s fairs as staging grounds for nation and empire. To argue as much, Auerbach identifies two conflicting modes of thought in contemporary English politics — liberal Cobdenite “Nationalism” and conservative Palmerstonian “Internationalism.” Both of these, he claims, shaped Exhibition discourse. These categories may be effective for discussions of high politics. However, they do not effectively elucidate the vexed place of Britain’s empire — whether the internal colonies of Ireland and Scotland or such far-flung possessions as India and Ceylon — in the Exhibition or in the mid-Victorian cultural imaginary. Nor do they sufficiently capture the nation’s role as “a site of contention, a source of conflict and debate,” to use Auerbach’s own words (4). Defying the boundaries of the international and the national, the Exhibition’s Commissioners and commentators fashioned the colonies simultaneously as a part of and apart from England...