Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (review)

For many people, the Great Exhibition of 1851 still stands as the triumph of mid-Victorian civilization, as it apparently did in its own day. Most written and visual accounts recommend the Exhibition’s material and secular characteristics, expressing confidence in its celebration of social and technological “progress.” The master narrative rarely includes dissent, controversy, or references to religion. Rather, the iron and glass structure itself and the countless commercial and technological displays within its courts extol free trade, reform, and machines—the secular holy trinity of Victorianism. Religious displays and other spiritual aspects of the show were deemed to have been peripheral, either missing the mark entirely, or merely expressing the crankiness of Evangelicals. The only notable exception was the controversy about Augustus Pugin’s construction of his neo-Gothic Medieval Court (110–112)—a dissent fueled by anti-Catholic and antipapal sentiments, part of the momentary fear of visiting papist “heathens” from the Continent. Otherwise, technology and peace dominate the story, both for the Victorians and their historians.

Cantor’s latest book upsets that tranquil picture of secular triumphalism by showing that the mid-Victorians took seriously the various religious aspects of the Great Exhibition. These were not peripheral interpretations but common ones; religion provided explanation, justification, praise, and criticism. The Bible, for example, helped Victorians to “make sense of the Exhibition” (6). Participants used the event to pursue converts, express England’s divine providence or its impending Apocalypse, bash Catholics and the pope, and fuel fears about Protestant religious tyranny. So much for pleasant mid-Victorian “equipoise” at the Crystal Palace!

Rather than secularism and consensus, religion and controversy were the order of the day. Anglicans, Quakers, Congregationalists, Catholics, Jews, and Nonconformists all considered the Great Exhibition as part of their religious view of the world and their place in it. Their Victorian “frame of mind” was not uniquely secular, or religious, but, more precisely, both, as was the Exhibition itself, reflecting a social and theological religiosity consistent with English culture and society at that time.

Cantor points out that conventional impressions about 1851 held at bay, if not ignored, the vast amount of literature—including sermons, handbills, and tracts—that discussed the Exhibition in religious terms. Those terms included the nation’s religiosity and that of particular visitors and exhibits, even the “heathens” among them. He has assembled a valuable array of such primary sources, made more meaningful when teamed with the interest in the Great Exhibition expressed in the popular religious press—Evangelical, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Wesleyan periodicals included. Cantor has unearthed nearly 150 different religious periodicals published in London during the decade leading up to the Crystal Palace. Contributors to such periodicals found religious meanings in seemingly secular displays, such as those of science and technology, and they were by no means reluctant to express in print specific religious interpretations.

The nuanced dance of science and religion both at and beyond the Great Exhibition is the essence of Cantor’s book. Cantor’s scholarship is a clear-headed, well documented, and an appropriately illustrated study of how the Victorians understood their religious and secular world. Celebrations of the Exhibition’s religious displays were echoed by expressions of religious fear on the part of Catholics and Protestants: Would the Exhibition lead to Britain being flooded by papists, or would the show be one more extreme example of Protestant power? If it were “paradise regained,” whose paradise would it be?

Not all of this discussion will be new to those who have read recent scholarship about the Great Exhibition, much of which has focused on competing interests and controversies. Those labors, however, rarely include references to the religious interests and controversies that Cantor grasps. No other scholar has so carefully explored the crossroads of mid-Victorian religiosity and secularism.

The author concludes by reflecting upon the event in “Retrospect.” His few passing thoughts about the closing ceremonies and about historians could have been strengthened by a consideration of...