The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, and: The Great Exhibition (review)

The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, by Jeffrey A. Auerbach; pp. vii + 280. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, $40.00.

The Great Exhibition, by John R. Davis; pp. xvii + 238. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999, £20.00, $36.00.

It has always been there, smack in the center of our view, so imposing and importunate that we have grown accustomed to peering around it--or, since it is glass, through it--at Victorian subjects less solicitous of our attention, less determined to be taken as indices of their age. To call the Crystal Palace or the Great Exhibition of 1851 "the elephant in the room" of Victorian studies would not be quite right, since the building and the event have not exactly become unmentionable, but have gone on being talked about, in chapters or essays by scholars in several fields. But book-length studies of the subject have been few and far between, at least since 1951, when several volumes were commissioned in connection with the Festival of Britain and the Exhibition's centennial. The two new books under review, appearing just in time for the 150th anniversary, constitute something of an embarrassment of riches. Both are the products of careful, even-handed historians bent on complicating past over-simplifications. Both books react against the tendency, inaugurated by enthusiasts in the Victorian press, to take the "Great Eggs-and- Bacon" and the seemingly magical site of the Crystal Palace as a still point in time and space from which to assess the Victorian age (the Morning Chronicle spoke of "the greatest human assemblage ever collected upon one small spot of the world's surface," gathered to "determine the exact degree to which, in the middle of the 19th century, the skill and ingenuity of man have arrived" [qtd. in Davis 134]). Neither Jeffrey A. Auerbach nor John R. Davis aims at the Crystal Palace the kind of destructive blast which Joseph Conrad's Verloc is ordered to unleash upon the Greenwich Observatory in The Secret Agent (1907), but both do seek, in their quieter ways, to undermine complacencies founded upon the symbolically potent structure by diverting our attention from its centripetal allure. That they should tell much the same story comes as no surprise; what is unexpected, and welcome, is that each book's distinctive strengths and emphases should complement the other's so well. Auerbach supplies a nicely differentiated account of how the Exhibition played in the provinces and, conversely, of how the provinces played their vital role in the Exhibition; Davis (author of a previous book on mid-Victorian Britain and the Zollverein) takes pains to furnish the Continental histories, perspectives, and predicaments that helped shape this vast collective act of British self-identification from without.

Auerbach and Davis both require us to appreciate their subject as, at one and the same time, "the greatest defining occasion for nineteenth-century Britons between the Battle of Waterloo [. . .] and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee" and as "containing not one but many different narratives" (Auerbach 4). Far from an inevitable Zeitgeist- expresser, the Exhibition reveals itself to have been a thoroughly improvised affair, recipient of more than a few lucky chances. What would have become of this reliable landmark in time, one wonders, if, at the most uncertain moment in its evolution, the Queen had not been attacked on the street, enabling Lord John Russell to forestall pesky questions in Commons? Or if Robert Peel had not suddenly died and provided the Exhibition with "something it badly needed--a martyr" (Davis 78)? Or if George Stephenson, head of the Executive Committee, had not, one fateful day, boarded the same train as Joseph Paxton? Or if Henry Cole had not "happened to pass by [the financier] Samuel Morton Peto's office" at a moment when £50,000 would come in especially handy (Auerbach 50)? Far from appearing the confident collective...