Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852

Chapter Two. First Rehearsal: Exhibition

T w o First Rehearsal Exhibition T  of the Crystal Palace and its assembly of manufactured articles in Hyde Park has been so frequently rehearsed that the  exhibition’s status as one of “the most influential representative bod[ies] of the nineteenth century” is now widely accepted,¹ even if its capacity to successfully advertise and champion Britain’s industrial supremacy has been seriously questioned in recent years. “The Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations” has been portrayed as an event that evoked the Victorian temper in singular ways, even as “the authentic voice of British capitalism in the hour of its greatest triumph.”² Its preeminence as a landmark event on the Victorian social and economic scene was also well documented by its early sponsors, who went to great lengths to advertise the glassed-in spectacle of goods as an inimitable, international tournament, “one of the most splendid and remarkable undertakings that has ever been attempted in [England] or any other country.”³ With its profitable, -day run, six million visitors, and fourteen thousand exhibitors, the exhibition appeared to many to have been an unmitigated success. Its triumvirate of  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. founding fathers (Henry Cole of the Public Records Office, Prince Albert as president of the Royal Commission, and Joseph Paxton as the Crystal Palace’s chief architect) was immediately and repeatedly extolled as an enlightened body cultivating Britain’s continued ascendancy in a competitive , international marketplace. The year  “really [did] mark the high point when the nation’s self-confidence was as yet unshaken,” ran the common estimation, “and when no Englishman would have admitted the possibility that other nations might one day equal, let alone surpass, Great Britain.”⁴ It is now generally recognized that this assessment was highly inadequate as a gloss on the moment of the exhibition, which was as much a response to anxieties about industrial capability as it was an undiluted celebration of Britain’s superiority in this domain.⁵ The exhibition, however, also offers a unique, richly allusive point of contact with the Duke of Wellington in the year preceding his death.This is a subplot well worth outlining, in part because the “Great Exhibition of Things”⁶ functioned as an immediate precedent,temporally and geographically ,for the exhibition of the Great Man’s corpse. In the funeral might be located the sedimentations and symptoms of the master narrative composed by the exhibition. Bell’s Life in London was explicit in its comparison of the funeral to the exhibition, foregrounding the more recent ceremony against a now surpassed spectacle, the latter already regarded as fading into history: “Within the metropolis were congregated more persons than were contained in the whole of England  years ago—a greater population than all of Scotland has now . . . very far greater than the population of London itself in that year of the Great Exhibition which appeared then the culminating point of the age of great cities.”⁷ Bell’s arithmetic is rather specious; the unsubstantiated correlation between superseded populations and the number of spectators briefly congregated to witness the funeral cortege is analogically useless, a comparison of apples with oranges. In terms of actual attendance, the exhibition topped the funeral by a margin of at least four to one. Still, in its very excess, in its fascination with numbers, and in its attempt to evaluate the historical significance of events through numerical tally and contrast, the newspaper points toward a peculiarly Victorian  The Wake of Wellington You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. compulsion to translate into pithy narrative the national appreciation for imposing pageantry. Wellington’s actual involvement in the magnificent opening of the Crystal Palace to the first twenty-five thousand ticket holders—which included his procession through the length of the building arm in arm with Waterloo veteran Henry Paget to the royal dais, where the two elderly heroes joined the queen, prince, royal chancellor, and numerous other dignitaries—elicited for those assembled to witness the scene a vivid sense of national and historical realization. Wellington’s physical presence at this moment of high festival reminded spectators of...