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Chapter One The March of Empire and the Victorian Conscience Look around you and see what is the characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous , more god-like state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that “there’s a good time coming,” and the hearts of gamins, as well as millenarians, answer, “True!” ... And for flesh, what new materials are springing up among you every month ... railroads, electric telegraphs ... chemical agriculture, a matchless school of inductive science, and equally matchless school of naturalist painters—and all this in the very workshop of the world! —Charles Kingsley, Yeast, 1851 There it stood—unreal, yet true—the unbelievable, the mighty structure of steel and glass, spreading its gigantic majesty over Hyde Park: England’s Great Exhibition Hall, soon to be named Crystal Palace. On May 1, 1851 it was officially opened by the Queen, the Prince Consort in attendance. Actually it was the latter’s project brought to life; he had fostered it, helped in its planning and in its fulfilment. Its creation was the work of that fabulous gardener’s son, Joseph Paxton. Two thousand feet long, four hundred feet wide, sixty-six high—glass, buttressed by iron, many of its parts prefabricated! Prophecy and fortress of reassurance and pride, its transepts rose over one hundred feet. The architects had taken care to protect the ecological beauties of Hyde Park, for the building enclosed its finest elms. What was probably the first World’s Fair brought together thirteen thousand exhibitors from many parts of the world, with their numerous products—handicrafts as well as machinery. One half of the exhibits were of England’s or her colonies’ manufacture ; among foreigners, French and German products stood out. Here was the world’s plenty—reaping machines from America, the Jacquard loom, the electric telegraph , agricultural implements—a physical compendium of modern technology. And not least, the building itself, another superb example of modern architecture—a fit monitory counterpart and answer to the prevailing taste for Gothic architecture, so graceful, so delicate, so airy, that its translucent beauty remains graven on my memory , wrote Lord Redesdale ... No mere human hand and hammers and builders’ tools could have wrought such a miracle.1 375 Not even Coleridge’s “magic dome,” that fantasy that his Kubla Khan had raised, could compete with this tribute to the modern spirit ... Thomas Babington Macaulay rejoiced, ... A most gorgeous sight; vast, graceful; beyond the dreams of Arabian romances ...2 And lest all this seem of the ancient past, the modern reader will rejoice to learn that the refreshments, including non-alcoholic beverages (de rigueur, of course) were provided by the firm of Schweppes ... That such a vast enterprise should have been completed within six months was merely another mark of England’s prepotency, underlined by the exhibition of her steam engines—“the trophies of her bloodless war.” It was, of course, particularly fitting that the ceremonies and visits to Crystal Palace be accompanied by due thanks to the Lord Almighty in various houses of worship, not excluding St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Thus was the Holy Gospel joined to those other no less sacred ones, the gospels of work, of peace, and Free Trade ... a tribute to the “working bees of the world’s hive.” And the six million visitors who streamed into those magnificent halls might have been reassured by the words of the very eminent William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who proclaimed that ... Here, the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital and machinery, uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods ...3 If anything else were needed to underline the “grandeur” and meaning of the Crystal Palace, it was there too—if not immediately in Hyde Park, then in the north of England. What was symbol here was reality there: the vast factories and mines, with their chimneys belching black smoke, with their machines roaring, with their thousands of men, women, and children, underground and above ground, laboring like “bees”—sweating, panting, scurrying to affirm England’s greatness ... England’s most popular poet—a master of catchy jingles—Martin Tupper, exulted: We travel quicker now than Isthmians might, In books we quaff the veriest Hebe’s...

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