‘That I call clever’, Thomas Carlyle wrote to his brother in January 1851. He had walked home in the frost to Chelsea from Hyde Park after taking another look at progress on the construction of the Crystal Palace. Like many of the London intelligentsia, Carlyle, a popular historian whose eyes fell on the present as much as the past, was sceptical about the whole extraordinary enterprise, launched with such clamour by Prince Albert two years earlier, during what the prince described as ‘a period of most wonderful transition’. Standing in Rotten Row, near the park’s southern boundary, Carlyle watched as steam-driven cranes raised high into the air their burdens of glass sheets. ‘Our Crystal Palace . . . is nearly glazed in: you never saw such a monster of a Gigantic Birdcage in your life.’
The Crystal Palace was built to house the greatest display of manufacture yet assembled, in which every nation would offer the fruits of its industry for assessment, comparison and display in London, in what was to be grandly called ‘The Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, the Great Exhibition. The world’s manufactures would flow into the capital in a manner and quantity matched only by the flow over the past century of works of art, antiquities and curiosities to enhance the nation’s museums and private collections. While not reversed, the flow was now radically changed in content and purpose, and allowed Britain to show itself as an integral part of a worldwide web of trade and fruitful contact with manufacturing nations, rather than as a recipient of treasure and tribute.
The campaigning journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew described the exhibition’s purpose:
The Great Exhibition is . . . the first attempt to dignify and refine toil; and by collecting the several products of scientific and aesthetic art from every quarter of the globe into one focus, to diffuse a high standard of excellence among our operatives, and thus raise the artistic qualities of labour, so that men, no longer working with their fingers alone, shall find that which is now mere drudgery converted into a delight, their intellects expanded, their natures softened, and their pursuits ennobled by the process.
This was not a new ideal. The House of Commons Select Committee enquiring in 1836 into arts and manufactures in Britain stressed the importance of good design in manufacture, clear and informative public displays of products, a museum in every workplace, and widespread access to education in art, science and literature. They took evidence from many influential and thoughtful people, including Francis Chantrey, Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Martin and John Pye.
What Carlyle found particularly clever about the Crystal Palace was the revelation that Joseph Paxton had designed it so that its steel girders and glass could be dismantled when the exhibition was over, taken away, and re-erected somewhere else like a nomad’s tent. The Crystal Palace was itself just one more exhibit: ‘he can build it again into streets of dwelling houses, into a village of iron cottages, or a world of garden greenhouses, without losing a pound of the substance employed (putty excepted).’ Paxton submitted his design at a moment of desperation for the exhibition planners, breathing new life into a venture that, in May 1850, was noticeably faltering. When Prince Albert announced plans for the Great Exhibition, an international competition was launched for a building which would serve a purpose never before required in Britain. The weekly journal The Builder was still announcing the competition as late as 22 June 1850, less than a year before the proposed opening of the exhibition. Two hundred and forty-five designs were finally submitted, ranging from the grandiose to the ludicrous, including ‘huge palaces, porticoes as large as that of the Exchange, sculpture, polychromy, copies of the Tuileries and Invalides . . . cast-iron ribs that would span St. Paul’s . . . a collection of sheds without effect or architectural character’. The design submitted by the commissioners themselves was a huge brick building with a slate roof and a low dome 200 feet across engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a ‘striking feature to exemplify the current state of the science of construction in this country’. It would have looked like a bosomy railway station.
The preparations for the Great Exhibition gave Londoners endless opportunities to mock the cost and magnificence of the festivities to come. Carlyle planned to escape: ‘I already have my own thoughts about flying away from London until it is all over.’ Nevertheless his fascinated concern remained, and he worried about the structure ‘letting in rain at every pore, and the sappers baling it, and the glaziers wringing their hands’. And then there were the birds: ‘thousands of sparrows have got into it, by the ventilators &c; and can’t be got out; they have called in the aid of arsenic.’ But worse:
bearded foreign people are already beginning to encumber the streets; and I suppose in six weeks hence, there will really be a great and very ugly crowd of British and foreign blockheads gathered here.
London was seriously disrupted as plans for the exhibition progressed. Not only were the streets congested by blocked roads (and ‘blockheads’), but many roads were up for repair, and those from the railway stations and the docks were encumbered with delivery traffic:
In all the main thoroughfares . . . heavy vans, piled high with unwieldy packing-cases, or laden with some cumbrous machine, and drawn by a long team of horses, crawled along, creaking, on their way towards the Crystal Palace.
London’s road system, crowded and dirty under normal use, was not designed for the quantity of traffic that the Great Exhibition demanded. Indeed, it had never been designed.
Henry Mayhew and the illustrator George Cruikshank collaborated on an account of the adventures of a northern family who came to London to see the show. It takes Mayhew twelve chapters of jaunty story-telling, through misadventure and comic mishap, to get his family to London, but once they have arrived he is able to engage his calling as a polemical writer. 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family allows Mayhew to project his views on the efficacy and potential of the Great Exhibition, using language that would never have found its way into official reports. The year of the exhibition happened to coincide with the first publication, in three volumes, of London Labour and the London Poor, the compilation of his articles first published in the Morning Chronicle in the 1840s. These drew attention to the depths of poverty and hopelessness in London, previously hidden or ignored. In writing about the Great Exhibition, Mayhew was able to highlight the social, as opposed to the commercial, opportunities that the exhibition offered. He was not particularly moved by the splendour of the event, but by how it might lead to social change and financial improvement for all.
In the weeks before the opening by Queen Victoria, the Crystal Palace was alive with painters painting, glaziers glazing, and drivers driving horse-drawn and steam-drawn wagons loaded with everything from piles of bricks from Essex to a carved sideboard from Germany. Against every column leant a ladder; at the top of every ladder was a painter with a can of blue, white, yellow or red paint, painting the girders following the strict decorative scheme devised by Owen Jones. On the roof glaziers walked with grace and elegance, making silhouettes on the skyline, ‘some walking along the crystal covering, and making one wonder how the fragile substance bore them’.
At the end of the building were steam engines puffing out their white clouds of steam, and amid the debris of a thousand packing cases stood giant blocks of granite, mammoth lumps of coal, stupendous anchors, and such huge articles as were too bulky to be placed within the building itself.
Nevertheless, there were critical moments of industrial tension: the painters went on strike, and three weeks before the opening the building was full of scaffolding and no exhibitor could get in. The weather was foul: two days before the opening a violent hailstorm ripped across Hyde Park, letting off a cannonade of sound as the ice stones hit the Crystal Palace. The Times reported that exhibitors doubted that the exhibition would open on time:
How after the many positive and authoritative intimations they have had, they should still in many instances refuse to be convinced, we are at a loss to understand.
Nothing changes: in mid-July 2012 the London Olympics were widely expected to be a disaster.
But 1 May 1851 turned out to be a sparkling May Day morning, a happy and clement beginning to weeks of fine weather. The queen opened the exhibition to a salute of cannon, the cheers of the crowd, and the Hallelujah Chorus. The event prompted superlatives in the press and wonder in the people. ‘There is an education which is not taught by books. It is working out its mission in the Crystal Palace.’ Mayhew went on to say:
No other people in the world could have raised such a building – without one shilling being drawn from the national resources, or have stocked it with the same marvellous triumphs of industry and art. The machine room alone, with its thousand iron monsters snorting and chattering, was a sight to overwhelm the mind with a positive sense of awe; stories were current of the strongest minds having been affected to tears by the spectacle; and most assuredly, what with the noise and the motion, there was a sense of reverent humility forced upon the mind, together with a feeling of gratitude to the Almighty . . . that filled the bosom with the very pathos of admiration.
Even the weather came up trumps, according to Mayhew:
One of the greatest and rarest curiosities that England presents at this moment to foreigners, who come to see the Exhibition, is decidedly the sun . . . For some days London has had a factitious air of Naples. Piccadilly and Regent Street are as scorching as Santa Lucia and the Chiaia . . . The Crystal Palace somewhat resembles a hot-house. One spends one’s time in looking for seats as near as possible to the fountains and basins of filtered water, and in eating those eternal creams, which are something like iced pomatum.
However, despite the celebrations the exhibition was not complete on 1 May. One early visitor, Isabella Mary Hervey, who attended only five days after the royal opening, reported that ‘the inside [was] not nearly finished’. Nothing had yet arrived from the United States, there was very little on show from Russia and France, and the Dutch exhibit was shoddy in the extreme. The Dutch poet Jacob van Lennep later reflected that this revealed a lack of interest from the Dutch government, and a refusal to spend money on the exhibition. In his poem ‘Thoughts on the Exhibition in London’ van Lennep wrote of his excitement at all the ‘miracles’ gathered in the Crystal Palace, but found there ‘a dark wasteland’ where the Dutch contribution should have been, on account of ‘the ice-cold word budget cut’ (‘Bezuiniging’). So distraught was the Dutch commissioner for the exhibition that he killed himself in his London hotel room.
What Isabella Mary Hervey particularly recalled, however, and described in her diary was the sound of organ music, the extraordinary drama of the trees in their May green, the sculpture and flowers, and the colour and the conglomeration of objects: ‘when I first went in I felt quite bewildered.’ And while there were lots of people present, the vast structure seemed to swallow up the crowds:
We staid there till near 6 & then came away very tired feeling we had only seen superficially about one quarter of what there is to be seen. We went in at the South Entrance in the transept and certainly the coup d’oeil on entering is one of the most curious and beautiful sights possible, the trees looking so green, the statues, the flowers, the red cloth in the galleries & all the different thing[s] exhibited look so curious all together & when I first went in I felt quite bewildered. The inside is not nearly finished. Russia and France have as yet very little. The United States nothing. Many of the Organs and Pianos were being played. There are 5 or 6 of the former some of them very large. There were a great many people but no crowd. The building is so immense it would take an enormous number of people really to fill it. There were not nearly so many foreigners in curious drapes as I expected to see.
‘Every body else the last fortnight has been living in the Exhibition’, Isabella added a few days later. ‘All people who can afford it having season tickets which for two pounds enables one to go as often as one likes; but we have been only once as many 5 shillings would soon ruin us.’ Nevertheless, she returned for another three hours to catch the missing exhibits:
Went to the Exhibition principally to see the Russias which is just opened. The Malachite things are quite beautiful there being doors tables cabinets & chairs all made of it . . . We went at ½ 4 & came away at 7 the best time I think on shilling days as the crowd begins to disperse.
Above all the activity, the building emitted such a volume of noise, with organs and pianos being played against each other in cacophony, all against the background of puffing and rattling machinery and the hubbub of the humans. Then the colour in the Crystal Palace struck the visitor most profoundly, and the way light changed things. Never had there been such an acreage of glass covering a roof; never had the sun shone and sparkled so spectacularly from a man-made construction; never had the science of optics had such a public outing; never had anybody seen or heard anything like it. A journalist writing for the Illustrated London News put it most succinctly:
As the eye wanders up the vistas, the three primitive colours of Sir D[avid] Brewster, red, yellow and blue, strike the eye by the intensity of their brightness in the foreground; but by blending in the distance, by the effect of parallax and diminished visual angle, the whole as in nature vanishes into a neutral grey . . . Looking up the nave, with its endless rows of pillars, the scene vanishes from extreme brightness into the hazy indistinctness which Turner alone can paint.
When it was all over in mid-October 1851, after five-and-a-half months of display, nearly six-and-a-quarter million people had visited the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park – more than twice the population of London. As it would be for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, they had come from all over the world. A measure of the extraordinary pressure that this put on London’s transport was revealed by the official figures: two-and-three-quarter million people were carried to London by rail and steamer in 1850, while in the year of the Great Exhibition – long before the underground railway had been built, and a decade before any serious action had been taken over sewage disposal – the number had nearly doubled to four-and-a-quarter million. After all the costs had been paid, the exhibition made a profit of £115,000. With immediate effect the Crystal Palace was cleared of its contents, dismantled, and taken away piece by piece to be re-erected on the hill at Sydenham.
In its financial, popular and organizational success, the Great Exhibition heralded a new attitude to the public consumption of art in Britain. Its immediate outcome was the Victoria and Albert Museum, founded in 1852 and built out of its profits. It also heralded another great temporary exhibition in Britain, the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition held at Old Trafford, south-west of the city centre, near to where the Manchester United football stadium now stands. The Manchester art palace, temporary glass and steel like its larger Hyde Park predecessor, was connected to its city and beyond by a railway line that ran along its southern edge, and with a station that was effectively part of the palace structure. With the Bridgewater Canal to the north and a good road system around it, all possible transport infrastructures were in place before building began, and were part of the consideration for choosing Old Trafford as the exhibition’s site.
The Manchester exhibition displayed, for the twenty-two weeks of its existence, more than 16,000 works of art lent from private collections all over Britain – none from abroad – and attracted over one-and-a-quarter million visitors. Not only was it a glittering showcase for the paying visitor (ticket prices from one shilling), it was also a stamp of approval for the art market, and a voluptuous parade for future art collectors in search of a sharp and shining point for their capitalist ventures. Among the masterpieces of world importance shown in Manchester, which were later whisked off to America after money had changed hands, were Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, Titian’s Rape of Europa, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Lawrence’s Elizabeth Farren. Nevertheless, many paintings found their way to British public collections, including another Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Young Man, Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III and Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons.
The Manchester exhibition had a profound effect on the development of the history, public understanding and accessibility of art. That it was held in Manchester, not in London, is an indication of the rapid economic growth of British provincial cities, and the dependence of the national economy by mid-century on manufacture and trade, and in particular the cotton industry. The exhibition heralded the growth from the second half of the century of civic art galleries including Manchester City Art Gallery (1882) and Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (1885); and art galleries and museums, opening decade by decade, that bear their founders’ names – Atkinson in Southport (1875), Barber in Birmingham (1932), Burrell in Glasgow (1944); running all the way through the alphabet, via Glynn Vivian, Higgins, Laing, Mappin, Tate, Towner and Usher, to Walker in Liverpool (1873), Whitworth in Manchester (1889) and Williamson in Birkenhead (1928). The names and dates of the foundations of these museums reflect the changing pattern of patronage, and thus the changing sources of disposable wealth.
Time goes into reverse when money or assets are given away, and so these gifts tend to reflect the aspirations of previous generations, as the collections themselves reflect past effusions of taste. The Seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam bequeathed his art collection and library to the University of Cambridge in 1816; the banker Sir John Julius Angerstein and the landowner Sir George Beaumont gave founding collections to the British Museum, in trust for the National Gallery. But then a bricklayer’s son, the architect Sir John Soane, bequeathed his house and collection to the nation in 1837; the horse-dealer Robert Vernon gave his collection in 1848; and the barber’s son J. M. W. Turner intended at his death in 1851 that a Turner Gallery be built for the nation. Following on over the decades, corporations, boroughs and the nation received the fruits of a lifetime’s collecting from brewer Sir Andrew Barclay Walker (Liverpool, 1873), machine-tool manufacturer Sir Joseph Whitworth (Manchester, 1889), sugar refiner Sir Henry Tate (London, 1897), copper entrepreneur’s son Richard Glynn Vivian (Swansea, 1911) and ship-owner Sir William Burrell (Glasgow, 1944).
In intention and vision, these men share the impulse in which private passion leads directly to civic outcomes. Their common root lies in the sense of enquiry that leads to the discovery of a new yellow pigment, the commercial and artistic daring that brings that colour to canvas, the intellectual and physical stamina that completes a complex and hard-won engraving of the painting, and the business sense and ruthlessness that allow the destruction of engraving plates that risked devaluing a greater asset.
While an art market may be the pinnacle circumstance of a capitalist economy, it can also, when the machinery is put into reverse, be the means whereby capitalism regenerates itself. Three towns at extreme points of Britain – Liverpool in Merseyside, St Ives in Cornwall and Margate in Kent – suffered serious economic decline in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the 1980s and 2000s, these towns were furnished against the odds, and perhaps counter-intuitively, with public art galleries of international standing and aspiration. Subsequently, the magnetic attraction of art is working its natural magic and is contributing fundamentally to the regeneration of these communities and their hinterland, and to the revival and variation of local businesses. Three towns that might have been closing in on themselves began gradually to blossom again. The final benefit of an art market, public and private display, has found its civic outcome in Liverpool, St Ives and Margate.