ABSTRACT
Ten months before the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, Richard Horne published an article entitled ‘The Wonders of 1851’ in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal Household Words. In this article, Horne took issue with the debate about which system of classifi cation the Committee of the Great Exhibition should adopt to order the mass of exhibits. There were two obvious choices: one was to sort them according to the different manufacturing processes to which they pertained, the other, to sort them by their place of origin. The former, ‘a fusion of the productions of all nations’, was the order favoured by Prince Albert, because it would ‘amalgamate and fraternise one country with another’.2 Moreover, it would also allow those visitors with a stake in manufacturing to compare different production methods directly.
