Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 by Geoffrey Cantor (review)

As a historian of science with an interest in religion, Geoffrey Cantor begins his book by commenting on the lack of any discussion of religion in four recent collections of essays on the Great Exhibition of 1851. This absence he attributes to the fact that we now live in a “secular age” (x), when academic historians are characterized by a “strong but largely implicit opposition to religion” (xi). Whatever the cause, the presumption of marginality attached to the role of religion in modern history is widespread. Cantor’s approach to this problem is straightforward. He puts religion back into the story of the Great Exhibition, leaving us with a fuller, richer, and more nuanced understanding of its significance.

Cantor has read hundreds of pamphlets, sermons, speeches, exhibition guides, and periodical articles published at the time of the Exhibition, classifying them broadly as belonging to either secular or religious conversations. The Exhibition was opened by the queen and the archbishop of Canterbury, and a performance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah (1742). Even these mild exercises of deference to religion led to controversy. The Tory journal John Bull complained that the queen was lending her prestige to the damnable doctrine of free trade, and the Roman Catholic Tablet grumbled about the archbishop’s privileged presence, an affront to the Roman Catholic minority. Hoping to avoid miring the Exhibition in ecclesiastical controversy, officials in charge of promoting the Exhibition used language that was largely secular, consisting of a celebration of progress and of Britain’s advanced stage of material achievement.

The religious conversation was far more diverse, reflecting the confusing fragmentation of mid-nineteenth-century British Christianity. Mid-Victorian Christians frequently held contradictory views, believing on the one hand that they lived in a secular age where Christianity was in retreat, and on the other hand that Christianity was growing in importance in the modern, industrial world. Prince Albert, the prime mover of the Exhibition, participated in both the secular and religious sides of the public debate depending on his audience. Cantor argues that Albert, when speaking candidly, took a fundamentally religious view of the significance of the Exhibition, reflecting a providentialist argument about the course of history that was shared by liberal Protestants and moderate evangelicals alike. The human ingenuity on display at the Exhibition provided an opportunity for a kind of natural theology demonstrating the mind of God at work, as well as being a catalyst for international peace and human brotherhood. W. E. Gladstone praised Albert’s speech at the Mansion House promoting the Exhibition as “a 5th Gospel, a new Evangel” (qtd. in Cantor 43). The providentialist point of view was on display in the choice of Psalm 24:1 for the frontispiece of the Official and Descriptive Catalogue of the Exhibition: “The Earth is the Lords and all that is therein is; the compass of the world and they that dwell therein.”

One of the great strengths of Cantor’s analysis is the care he takes to identify, when possible, the point of view of each author according to religious denomination, Anglican church party, or theological persuasion. In the pamphlet war that accompanied the Exhibition, the theme of providence dominated the pro-Exhibition Christian mainstream. Providentialist sermons and pamphlets, laced with scriptural references, were often addressed to a diverse body of Christian critics who were either hostile to the Exhibition or skeptical about its alleged benefits. Critics invoked a threat to religion from an invasion of sabbath-breaking foreign tourists, or a threat to Protestantism from an influx of continental Catholics, or a threat to the monarchy and public order from refugee continental radicals. Others condemned the Exhibition as an un-Christian display of human pride, invoking biblical imagery with very persuasive analogies to Belshazzar’s Feast and the Tower of Babel.

Christian supporters of the Exhibition confronted the critics not only with a natural theology of human ingenuity, but with a once-in...