In Our Time - The Great Exhibition of 1851

Episode Date: April 27, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1851 Great Exhibition. “Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.” So wrote Charlotte Bronte in 1851 after visiting the Great Exhibition set in the vast Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park. By the time the exhibition closed, one quarter of the entire British population had visited Crystal Palace, the first pre-fabricated building of its kind, to marvel at an extraordinary array of exhibits there. Amongst them were the biggest diamond in the world, a carriage drawn by kites, furniture made of coal, and a set of artificial teeth fitted with a swivel devise which allowed the user to yawn without displacing them. The Great Exhibition was huge in terms of the development of British manufacturing, the burgeoning of a global consumer market, the development of museums and the international standing of Britain culturally and technologically. It was also a triumph for Prince Albert and it turned a tidy profit. How did the Exhibition crystallise a particular moment in early Victorian Britain? In what way did it capitalise on the dawn of mass travel and greater levels of international co-operation? How did fears of revolutionary Europe define the policing and organisation of the event? And how far, if at all, did the Great Exhibition go in blurring class distinctions? With Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter; Hermione Hobhouse, Architectural Historian and Writer; Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, quote, its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things.

Whatever human industry has created, you find there. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this massive wealth from all the ends of the earth, end quote. So he wrote Charlotte Bronte in 1851, after visiting the great exhibition set in the vast Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park. By the time the exhibition closed

one quarter of the entire British population had visited Crystal Palace, the first prefabricated building of its kind, to marvel at an extraordinary array of exhibits amongst which were the biggest diamond in the world, a lighthouse, a huge microscope, a carriage drawn by kites, furniture made of coal,

and a set of artificial teeth fitted with a swivel device which allowed the user to yawn without displacing them. Its impact was great in terms of the growth of British manufacturing, the burgeoning of a global consumer market, the development of museums, and the international standing of Britain, culturally and technologically. So how did the exhibition, as it were, crystallise a particular moment in early Victorian Britain? In what way did it capitalise on the dawn of mass travel and greater levels of international cooperation? And what ideas drove it?

with me to discuss the great exhibition at Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Hermione Hobhouse, Architectural Historian and Writer, and Clive Amsley, Professor of History at the Open University. Jeremy Black, what do you think the great exhibition was an expression of? I think it was an expression of the age of utilitarianism, the idea that human effort ought to be organised for the improvement of mankind. And I think both visually and in terms of the contents of the exhibition,

it very much fulfilled that purpose. What it discussed in terms of the ideas behind it at the time? Very much so. There was a large debate about the direction in which Britain ought to be going. There was tension about how far it ought to embrace the ideas of industrialisation. Was industrialisation, in other words, something that was unfortunate, something that we had to have in order to finance the existing system, or how far should there be, as it were, an embrace of modernity? Modernity understood in terms of the public use of the industrial,

profit that was coming through. And where did this discussion take place? It was in the magazines. Are we talking about coffee houses? Where would we look to find evidence of this discussion about Britain's place in the world and future in the world? You could see it in terms of magazines and newspapers. You could see it in terms of Parliament. In some respects, it had been a politically central issue in terms of the debate over the repeal of the corn laws.

The idea as to whether we should be primarily in some respects a country which had a protected agricultural system, protectionism or whether we should be open to the world and see how far our industrial capital and technological prowess would take us. You're talking of it, you're talking in terms of it being a pivotal moment in the redefinition perhaps, or the new definition of Britain.

I think it was a pivotal moment. I think it was a pivotal moment both in terms of policy, but also as an expression of a new Britain. I mean, in some respects, you get the opening, and in some respects it's very traditional. You have the Queen,

very much in that you have the Archbishop of Canterbury, reorganising public prayers. You have a grand procession with all the dignitaries, etc, etc. But in other terms, what they were seeing and the context within which they were seeing it was dramatically new and different. Prince Albert has always been associated with it. And he, excuse me, he headed it up as it were. What impact did he have and what impact is his being there have? Prince Albert was very important. He didn't originate the idea. The idea in many senses rested in a body called the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Manufacturers, manufacturers commerce and arts, which is known as now as the Society of Arts,

which is still there, a body that was founded in 1754, and had sponsored the kind of applied knowledge right through with competitions in the 18th century and with relatively small-scale exhibitions and were still doing this in the 19th century, it's still there today, in fact. But Prince Albert, who was president of this body from the 1840s onwards, was important because he helped to make it a publicly acceptable policy. He went around there are cartoons in places like Punch, showing, making fun of the way in which he solicited subscriptions to help finance the body, the great exhibition.

And I think without a doubt, if Prince Albert hadn't been behind it, it wouldn't have been on the same scale or with the same intellectual sort of scope. Well, coming from Germany and a small kingdom in Germany, small city, state, state, he had an idea of how loud you had to shout to get noticed, really. I think that's fair. It's also worth saying they had exhibitions, including in Germany. There was a big one in 1844, so he was aware. of this wider international context. But if you look at Albert's policy within Britain, Albert was a determined moderniser. He was a firm believer in utilitarianism, and he was very interested in public health,

he was very interested in the improvement of society. And also he saw that as having a crucial public purpose that economic progress might open up big social divisions. And as far as Albert was concerned, it was very important for the stability of society to try and have social cohesion and also, and this was very much of interest of the Royal Society of the Arts, a kind of aesthetic basis to industrial progress.

Hermione Hopas, an advisory committee was set up to plan the exhibition. How influential were Francis Fuller and Henry Cole. Could you tell us about the part they played? I think they were the people who started it out within the Society of Arts. The Society of Arts had suffered the usual decline and had then been pulled up and was starting to reassert itself in the 1840s. and Francis Fuller, who was a land surveyor, and who played a very important part later on,

and other members, including Henry Cole, began to pursue this matter of an exhibition. This was founded very largely on the French model. The French had had exhibitions of trade ever since the British had upset their trade so badly in the Napoleonic Wars. So the French reckoned that they knew about exhibitions, and this was made very clear throughout the 1851.

So that I think that what they were trying to do was to emulate the French and to beat them at their own game. The French came over to advise, and the British thought they were rather supercilious, as I understand it. They were very, the letters are absolutely marvellous. We, who've been doing it for some time could help you. And they get short shrifted, though, from the British advisory commission? I think the British were very,

And, of course, Queen Victoria was very keen on Napoleon the 3rd, so they had to be rather diplomatic. What kind of, what was the regional involvement in the planning process? We know it. Well, this was very impressive. They sent Henry Cole, Francis Fuller and two or three others round to beat up local interest. And they had, what is also very important about the 1851 exhibition is their marvellous record keeping. They will tell you who was the. chairman of the Oval Committee and who the secretary and treasurer were,

so that you can work out in very small places how much money they raised, how many exhibits they sent, and who the leading figures were. And they had them all over the place. There were obviously places like Bradford Yorks, which had an exhibition, but so did Bradford on Avon. So there are little exhibitions. It spawned little exhibitions all over. all over the country.

All over the country. And you get figures like, for instance, the clerks, the shoe people from street, spearheading the Glastonbury thing, so that you can see who was important and who in each of these communities was actually raising the money. What were they, to use a brother Koster, I mean, please excuse me, what were they selling? How were they selling it to people they're going around? Because they're asking them to put themselves out a great deal, to invest a great deal. So we've had the intellectual and social background, some extent, from Jeremy.

When they went out, beating up support, as you put it, what was their line? Well, they'd already produced one or two rather minor exhibitions in this country. Their point which I think people like the Clarks took was that this would enable them to sell more shoes and so on and so forth. So that it was a deliberate attempt to interest industrialists in getting their wares out.

And of course there was, as soon as they enspanned Prince Albert, they had royal patronage which they never had before. And this made an enormous difference. Clare Amnesley, this is a time of huge political turmoil in the rest of Europe, the 1840s and particularly 1848 revolutions, uprisings. And a big movement here in this country, but it didn't turn into a revolution or an uprising. It just turned into a big movement, as it were.

Can you tell us about 1848 and the impact that had had on Europe and how it left Britain as well? Well, I think the British tended to feel rather smug about 1848. The British could say, manifestly, we have the best constitutional system in the world. We don't have revolutions like everyone else in Europe. There'd been massive insurrection in Paris, which had required an enormous military intervention. There'd been trouble throughout the Italian peninsula, in Vienna, in Berlin, crown heads had rolled.

So the British could sit back and say, well, we didn't have a... We had the Chartists. We had the Chartists, which led to some confrontations between the new metropolises. Bolton Police in London and political, well, chartists, demanding the right to vote, demanding a constitutional change. But it wasn't violent in the sense that it had been violent in Europe. So the great exhibition can almost be seen as a kind of celebration coming on top of that. Look, we have the best constitutional system.

we have the best economic system come and see us celebrate it. A lot of Amford and energy went into the policing event, and the police, 22 years old at this stage, became much more important as a result of this exhibition. And there were fears that the revolutionary in this country might arise, despite the Pacific Chartes, as it were, or they might come over to visit it, and revolutionaries might mingle with the crowd,

that were expected and set little bonfires alight in London. Can you tell us how that was met? Well, it's even more interesting because Britain had become a haven for liberal revolutionaries from across Europe. So London had got a clutch of Italians and Germans, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Matzini and so on and so forth, who'd settled in London after the revolution. And there were Cassandra's saying that if we have this exesed, we're going to have revolution because you'll be inviting vast numbers of people to London, to this exhibition. There'll be a mixing of classes. And we've got the threat of the dangerous classes, a term which had been coined just a decade before by a French police bureaucrat, honorary frisier.

So there is this... The dangerous classes? The dangerous classes, yeah. So there is this major concern. Now, the implication was, from 1848, that Britain doesn't have revolutions, and possibly one reason for that, is this new police force, which is civilian, which doesn't as a rule carry either edged weapons or guns. and so there was the hope, the belief that the exhibition could be policed by this new kind of civilian police and a new division was created of a thousand men specifically for supervising the exhibition. I'll come back to that in a moment because it's fascinating when they developed.

Jeremy Black, just to sum up this section, the exhibition was a huge organisational feat. We're going to get into what it is. There had been other exhibitions. Mine is told us about France, exhibitions in France. This was on an enormous scale. Were there any precedents, any, in this country,

for that sort of thing at all? Not for exhibitions like that. For mass public gatherings, yes, but of a very different type. I mean, the state funeral of Nelson, which was held on the 9th of January 1806, saw enormous numbers of people in the streets around St. Paul's,

which was where it was held. Again, it was a highly choreograph, episode, but of course the difference between the state funeral of Nelson, or, for example, that one of Wellington, which followed the Great Exhibition, was held on the 18th of November 1852 and allegedly had about one and a half million people turn out for Wellington State funeral. The difference between those is that, of course, there are these one-day affairs which are very much public state occasions, whereas the great exhibition, in a sense, it has that on the opening day, and thereafter, it's much more of, well, one hastens, one has to use the word

cautiously, but it's much more of a democratic institution thereafter. I mean, in essence, as long as you're prepared to pay your ticket to get in, and obviously there are different prices for different days and all the rest of it, you can go in and see it, and you can choose how to move around the exhibition. There are, of course, guidebooks, but you can choose which order you want to see the things in. You can actually read literature that praises it, but there's also contemporary literature that criticises it. So in some respects, and again, one has to be careful

of how one uses this word, but in some respects, it's a much more modern occasion. And to that extent, a modern occasion of that scale in Britain was unprecedented. It ran for five and a half months. Hermione Hopphaus, can you tell us a bit about the building? It was based on a plan by Sir Joseph Paxton, who had had a lot of experience of at Chatsworth, one way and another. Can you just tell us about the construction of this marvellous building in High Park? Well, it's a very funny story because they asked for designs to start with. They produced, as they got, as you know, some 200 designs, which number from the French. Then the people who were behind the exhibition, Brunel, Barry, a whole series of well-known figures, decided they could do their own.

And they produced a monstrous design, an enormous red brick box, which would have taken three or four years to build, let alone to make the bricks. and Joseph Paxton, who trained as a gardener for the Duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire in Derbyshire, produced a design based on one of his conservatories. And he, very cleverly, he was a very early advocate of spin, gave the story to the Illustrated London News, who put it out alongside the other one, and he was more or less popularly given the job because nobody could argue with him. He'd been all ready to see his glass manufacturer,

he'd been all ready to see the man who was going to make the iron. And it was basically an enormous glass house. Enormous in the same, I mean, it covered oak trees, didn't it? It covered elm trees and 18 acres of Hyde Park. and you can still apparently find the foundations because when they took it away, they left the foundations underneath Hyde Park. But it was basically built as a great glass house.

The glass was produced by a Birmingham manufacturer called Chance, and of course Fox and Henderson were the marvellous contractors. But Wadwan also has to say that he was backed up by the people who planned the original, rather ridiculous building, The modules were the same, the way in which it was laid out, had all been planned by the earlier people. And people like Wilde and Dilk went on to work with Paxton. Paxton is very good at giving the impression,

all his biographers are that he did it all by himself, but he didn't. The nearest modern equivalent, if you want to see a building which comes to something of the scale, nowhere near as big, is the Musei d'Orsay in Paris, which in a way, if you go into that, funnily enough, if you thought of a much bigger version of that, with industrial goods in it, but also, incidentally, the sculptures that they have in the Mise d'Orsay,

because those kind of sculptures were very much present in the great exhibition. It gives you a sense. And in a way, it was like the great architecture that was going to be taken forward of the architecture of the railway. The railway, the big, I mean, a building like Paddington in Britain, which is a tremendous building, if you actually look at it in architectural terms, again, it's a small example of the great exhibition. Yes, and it was, to use that, again, sorry about the phrase,

it was cutting-edge engineering, wasn't it? I mean, to get the amount of glass, the size of glass, and the speed at which it was put up, when I was reading about it, that's astonishing to get it. It was absolutely astonishing. It would have been the biggest building in London. Obviously, in terms of secular buildings, the only equivalent buildings you could probably have thought of

that dominated skylines were the massive cathedrals. And it was a wonder of the age. It was, in fact, if you think about it. it's probably the first wonder of the modern age architecturally. And it held about 14,000 exhibits. An enormous number of people, Clive Ames, that came to this exhibition from all over the country. We told that one in four of the population, so it.

Can you tell us how the movement of people, have they got there, how they could get there so cheaply, how they could afford it, and so on? Yes, I mean, it may not have been quite that number. There was something like 6 million entries, and some people would have bought a season ticket, it and came back time and again. What happened, I suppose it was rather like the way the financing of various exhibitions

was created in the country. Mechanics institutes, for example, would have collections and they would put the money in a local savings bank so that members of that institute could go to London. employers financed their workforce to go down, or members of their workforce to go down. Vickers and teachers took impoverished young scholars to the exhibition. I mean, it really is an attempt to attract people from all social classes. some of them are contributing for their own travel they're receiving money from local MPs

of putting into mechanics institutes collections or collections in some of the big towns the mayors of the big towns are getting sponsorship so that people can go from the towns it really is seen as a great national event that everyone really wants to get involved in and from the records is it's occasion of national pride Are people coming back like Charlotte Bronte or like Queen Victoria in her very, very detailed and brilliant accounts of it,

are people tremendously impressed and proud of to be there? Is it a sort of proudest to be British occasion? Yes, I guess that would be, probably the best way of putting it, you know, but this is also a symbol of the age, it's a symbol of progress. And we are part of progress. And actually by going and participating, you know, some of that is going to rub off on individuals. I mean, in terms of the pride in being British, on the opening day, the bands were playing Rural Britannia.

They were playing the national anthem. They were playing the, they had a performance of the Hallelujah chorus from the Messiah. It was very much a patriotic occasion to start off. One of the most important things about it is the railway, of course, because in fact you can trace this. The railway, the Great Western Railway got as far as Frum in 1851, and an enormous party of children were sent. up from, but they didn't come from further west.

The answer was that this would have made an enormous difference. There's also a very moving account of a whole lot of Kentish people who were brought up by their vickers. And these were people in their smocks. And people who saw them walking from Waterloo up to the Hyde Park said, these people are stranger to us than these foreigners. We've seen French foreigners before, but these sort of peasant people, you know, we haven't seen in London.

So it was an enormous moment for the country to see the other half, as it were. It was a time when a lot of people made a major journey for the first time, not in their lives, within lives of the generations behind them, wasn't it? Absolutely. Can you give a... Jeremy, you used the word cathedral, the building, and Clive was talking about symbol. I'd like to get into the idea...

It was proclaiming some sort of gospel this as well, wasn't it? There was a faith at work here. I mean, a secular faith. I'm usually... I'm deliberately being slightly provocative here, but something else is going on beside the exhibits themselves? Very much so. I mean, there was, incidentally, a religious dimension.

I mean, the Archbishop of Canterbury led prayers at the opening ceremony, but essentially, yes, it was a secular faith in progress, and a secular faith that human beings, through their own endeavour, could improve society. So that was seen both in the literature surrounding it. It was seen in many of the exhibits. I mean, things like, for example, which to us may seem mundane, condensed milk. Now, condensed milk, which was one of the things that was shown on the British, in the British area, because it was a British development,

was shown in the way in which through modern society you could create a safer product which could then be moved from the countryside. Instead of worrying about fresh milk, you could actually condense it and therefore drink it in the industrial cities and make life better for the bulk of the population. So there was a very strong utilitarian purpose there. And I think in the sense of what you would have seen,

you would have been very impressed that human beings could improve there. society. Hermione Hobbes, did the exhibition blur the distinction between art and commerce? I think it was always, in fact, the way in which the classes were organized made it perfectly clear that what they were interested in was, in fact, commerce and not art. There were 30 classes of which... Of exhibits, 30 classes.

30 classes of exhibits. And only one was dedicated to art. there was a number dedicated to raw materials, another to machinery, and a great many to manufacturers. And though some of the manufacturers were artistic in their terms, perhaps a little hideous to us, basically it was very clear that it was not about art. And this was one of the things that the Prince Consort was very clear about. It should be about manufacturing, creation of interesting manufacturers

which would bring England forward both in terms of technology and in terms of design. Because of that, was there some opposition to Pugin had his own corner, didn't it? He rather despised the building, he thought it was... Well, in fact, there was a medieval court which was actually largely filled with objects produced by Pugin's builder, George Myers.

So in fact, Koojin had his little corner. It was one of the most glamorous ones. The other one was, of course, the East India Court, which was filled with products brought by the East India Company from the subcontinent. Clive, can you give us some idea before it? Just give us more stuff that was in it for listeners who, what sort of things were in it?

Maybe all chip in. What were we going to see? When you're going to see things from literally all over the world, There's a Chinese stand. Apparently the Chinese government didn't want to get involved, so the British in Hong Kong set that one up. There were American stand. Every, I think, 32...

American mowing machine, that'd get a reaping machine, wasn't it? Yeah, and 32 different countries sent products and almost, I guess, a celebration of their own achievements. So it is a... It's an international exhibition with the British thinking that they were really sitting on top. The Fokeston, for example, which was a big locomotive, which was for the trains on the London to Paris link. That's an example of the sort of thing. Big pieces of coal-driven equipment.

So the locomotive was in the issue. Oh, the localit, full-scale locomotive. I mean, remember, the great thing about a building of that size is you could have the largest pieces of industrial equipment that you wanted to display. and the manufacturers displayed all sorts of metal bashing equipment. There were large pieces of coal to actually show people. And remember, most people in London, although London was an industrial city, it was a sort of city of crafts, really. They hadn't seen these great pieces of metal bashing,

which were really quite impressive. As Clive says, I mean, if you look across the world, what's interesting is there's a much more eclectic basis of what's sent in by different countries. So, for example, from Germany, there's much more of an emphasis on manufacturing, goods. From France, there's slightly more aesthetics, including

in fact some erotic sculptures which they had to cover up because the bishops didn't like them. Let's go back to the policing because you've got these crowds coming in, massive crowds, walking through the streets from the railway stations as Hermannes pointed out mostly and going to Hyde Park,

milling around, and hundreds of thousands of people. There's a fear that there might be agitators in London anyway who might use it agitators might come over from other countries. So the London Police bring in to play European Police and say, we want your advice on how to deal with the people coming from your countries.

It's a big operation, isn't it? I'm emphasising it because it was so successful as an operation and because it established the police in this country as a new force. Yes. Well, as I said earlier, there is a new division created of 1,000 men. They invite people from the big British cities to come down to advise them on known criminals who they think might be. be trying to pick pockets. They also invite something like three dozen European policemen to come and

advise the Metropolitan Police and to walk round with plain-closed Metropolitan Police officers looking for pick-pockets in the exhibition. The Europeans think this is wonderful because they can send their men over actually to keep an eye on their political exiles, but they do also wand around the exhibition. The wonderful incident happens of a group of French-speaking men who are believed to be behaving suspiciously, so the Metropolitan Police go in and arrest them,

and they turn out to be half a dozen Belgian detectives who've actually been invited by the Metropolitan Police to advise on European pickpockets. That'll teach them to speak a foreign language. Absolutely. Yes, can we, round for five and a half months, Samarani Hobass, as we said. What happened to the Crystal Palace after us?

It was dismantled, and then another great operation took place. Well, there was an enormous rub out it. Pakistan naturally wanted to keep it there, and he got a whole lot of people from Manchester who thought it would be lovely. The Londoners were less keen on having 18 acres of Hyde Park, totally barred to them. And finally, it was taken on by a railway company,

ran through Sydenham, a man called Lang, who owned property there, and Francis Fuller, the surveyor, came back in and was, I think, the nominal chairman of the Sidnum Company, which provided a new venue for it. And of course, it was far more successful as a venue than Hyde Park. One of the problems about Hyde Park had been that there was no railway access, and I think this is very interesting that they had terrible trouble moving those great... bits of machinery because they had to be moved by horse and cart. And the idea of moving even a small engine by horse and cart is very horrifying. So that the Sidnham thing was railway link from the start.

It was rebuilt rather more grandly, and both Brunel and Barry were involved. They put up enormous towers which carried the water. The idea was Paxton was called back and he provided a whole series of fountains which were something that everybody felt they should have. So there you've got this great palace full of all kinds of interesting things like a copy of Abu Symbol

which was recreated by a whole lot of authorities. And it was also a place that Londoners could go and presumably get drunk and sit around on a Sunday and Saturday afternoon. So it became a very impopular place to start with. Until it burnt down in 1936. Well, it suffered an eclipse. What is very sad about it was it became really quite a problem.

Just before the 14 War, Lord Plymouth put up enough money to save it. Then it was really revived quite well. but in 1936 for some reason it burnt down. There is a theory that the government had it burnt down because they were frightened about German bombing and that it had been very useful to the Zeppelin's in the 1418 war because you could see it from miles away. There is another theory that it was just incompetence.

It was full of odds and ends and rubbish, and of course once it went up, there was nothing much you could do. It was a very smart fire, if you may say so. It could be seen from Brighton, and one member of the royal family turned up in his dinner jacket, actually at Sidnham to watch it. So, I mean, it didn't go unnoticed. Let's go back into the middle of the 19th century, Jeremy. What were the responses to the Great Exhibition at home and abroad?

Because I've been pushing it, and you've been talking in positive, and almost you logistic terms, but there were other opinions, weren't there? There were other opinions. I mean, Karl Marx commented that the Crystal Palace was a... in which the bourgeoisie had erected gods in its own image and was now worshipping them. I think it's fair to say that that was a minority opinion, but on the other hand, it was pointed out by a number of commentators that the Great Exhibition, sorry, that the Great Exhibition offered nothing in terms of the account of the plight of workers. I mean, for example, there are one or two cartoons, even in punch, and obviously in more radical periodicals, there's far more on that. And indeed, it's worth bringing out something we haven't mentioned yet that during the building of it, which was,

incredibly impressive. There were also labour disputes, and that aspect of it tends to be downplayed, that they weren't regarded as particularly, the constructors weren't regarded as particularly good employers. I think, though, on the whole, although there was criticism, of course, there was some foreign criticism. You get occasional foreign criticism on aspects of this being, you know, British grandstanding, and, for example, the opening ceremony, the foreign ambassadors are treated as sort of almost like subjects of British greatness. Although you do get that, on the whole, what is interesting is that the, The contemporary perception was of amazement. It was much greater in scale than any of the continental exhibitions had been hitherto.

That impressed foreigners, and the British were impressed by it as a display of beneficent patriotism. There were concerns about visitors being ripped off by people putting up hotel prices, by restaurants overcharging. And if you look at the Times correspondence columns at the very beginning, there were concerns that people would order and then the menu would be lost and they would be charged twice as much when the bill came, which was all put down to employee error. Oh, the waiter is new, sir, he doesn't really know. But as the exhibition wore on, these concerns become fewer and fewer. And people, again, that becomes something to celebrate that visitors aren't really being ripped off in the way that we feared they would be. And these kinds of concerns just disappear from the letter columns.

Have we any idea of the, because we're talking very much of a class society and a class society that's changing, but would see itself as a class society. Have any idea of the distribution of the classes in the attendance at the exhibition? very difficult to say, but certainly the cheapest tickets were a shilling. And with the... That's for all day, is it? That's for all day. Yeah, for the whole day.

Well, it's for the whole day, but it's on certain days of the week. I think that's Monday to Thursday. It's more expensive on Friday and Saturday. So the people who are coming from the big industrial cities, from the countryside and so on, are not really coming, they're not going on the expensive days. And the one shilling is part of the package that they're getting in the collections and in their own collections that are going on. But there is a massive mixing of classes.

I mean, it's already been pointed out about the Kentish people in their smocks and so on and so forth. One of the things, of course, was how soon they brought down the price. The price had come down from Monday to Thursday already in May. And curiously to our ideas, it goes up on Saturdays. But I think there was an enormous mix. And one of the things I wanted to say about the exhibition, the actual things exhibited, that some of them strike us as rather odd.

One of the ones that was most was the American Harim Powers' is Greek slave. which was actually a figure of a lady stark naked and chained. It's a great embarrassment to the American Museum that has it these days because it's so unfashionable, but it was much seen at the time. And another thing which is rather interesting is an enormous monument by kiss of an Amazon riding a horse being attacked by a lioness, which can still be seen outside a museum in Berlin. And this was a copy made in zinc.

and this was therefore came in as a mechanical thing rather than an artistic object and it's a very interesting example it was one of the things most noticed but it was there because of the ability to provide it in zinc rather than rather than work of art Jeremy is there a German Buck? Is there any sense in which this is seen as a shift in where the power might lay in this country

that this is the industrial manufacturing bit, belt, saying, you know, not we are the rulers now, but very little to do with the landed aristocracy, the warrior class, the court class, which had, I in large, run things for a very long time. Is that in the air? Absolutely. 1851 is the first of the national censuses in which the majority of the population live in the towns or the cities, and there is a fundamental shift. In fact, really, modernity takes place in the third quarter of the 19th century,

and the great exhibition sees a massive recognition of the fact that Britain is industrialising, that the agricultural sector is being hit hard by international trade. I mean, it's linked to the repeal of the corn laws, which had been an incredible defeat for the agricultural interest and had split the Conservative Party, or the Tories, whatever you want to call them then. And in a sense, there is a, with the Great Exhibition, and there is simultaneously a national mood, but as you also correctly say,

it's elements within the society of the use of public institutions and private commercial interests in order to modernise Britain. I think the combination of the two is very important. Clive, can I just ask you to give us a brief comment on what impact this had around the world, what it did for Britain's reputation?

Well, I mean, it's, I suppose basically what Britain wanted it to do. That here you have a massive exhibition, which is attracting people from, well, certainly all over Europe and probably some from America. I'm not sure that we really know the figures from America. But there is excursion traffic organized from France to this. And it does have this sort of massive impact that certainly liberal,

in Europe are looking to Britain for the constitutional and economic model to follow. And the exhibition really cements that in the way that people within Britain understand it and the way that liberals, not the authoritarian perspective, perceive of the country or people who look at perfidious Albion understand Britain. but yeah, it does what people wanted it to do. Crucially, of course, Queen Victoria and the British elite embrace it, so it's not divisive in the sense that it could have been if it had been in a different political context.

I was going to say it also demonstrates that the classes can exist side by side and can go and rub shoulders with each other at an event. And that I think is very significant. after the hungry 1840s, chartism, revolutions and so on. Hermione Hopas, can I come to the finally to find a question the legacy, which is the great museums of South Kensington and so, which is a direct legacy and a massively important one for this country? Well, they refounded the Royal Commission immediately after the exhibition closed,

and it still stands today. In fact, I in my time was a commissioner. And it has a great educational role. First of all, it set up the South Kensington Museums, and they're almost all tenants on the commissioners. And they put up the Albert Hall, the various museums, the V&A and so on and so forth. And they also, later on, started producing scholarships. They did a lot in scholarships in the 1890s, particularly for provincial museums,

where they sent a lot of people to interestingly be educated in Germany. and they are still producing scholarships today. So they are, in fact, a very important relic of the great exhibition. It's a tremendous drive-through, isn't it, that? You've got to, I mean, there's unequivocal admiration for the way, not only exhibition, but drove right through to the museums and the broader cultural. Absolutely, and of course it was copied abroad. I mean, things like the Paris exhibition, which leads to the Eiffel Tower,

looked directly to the British example. It was seen as a tremendous international event. Well, and again, it's followed. followed a hundred years later by the great exhibition in London to celebrate the new Elizabethans and the coming out of the austerity of the Second World War, hopefully coming out of the austerity of the Second World War, this new exhibition which again is celebrating discovery, the dome of discovery, the skyline and so on, progress.

Final word, Jeremy Black. I think that if you look at the great exhibition, you can see it exemplifying the utilitarianism, the globalisation, the liberalism, the social mixing, which were many of the better features of British society. Obviously there were faults, obviously there were flaws. But on the whole, I think it's one of the few great examples of an occasion we can celebrate without equivocation.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Hermione Hophouse. Thank you, Clarend Humphrey and Jeremy Black. Next week we'll be talking about fairies, their mythical creatures that obsess the Victorians, fed the 16th century witchcraft trials, and were the child demons of the ancient world. And I'm supposed to say there are podcasts,

newsletters and downloads around the place. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.