[Anon.], ‘Our Last Look at the Great Exhibition’, The Appeal (1851)

Posterity will be utterly unable, by any effort of imagination, to conceive what drew such myriads of their ancestors to the spot, and dismissed them so delighted with such an almost solemn pleasure. The perfect and often beautiful workmanship of even the most ponderous machines, the delicate construction of others, the feats which some of them performed, not of power merely, but of complex operation almost appearing like the work of intelligence; then the beauty or the adaptation to its object of the products of the loom; the almost inconceivable elegance and richness of the furniture, cabinet, and carved work; the ingenious implements of every kind, with things far too numerous to recount even in a general statement, – all combined testified that man, man in the classes least favoured by wealth and fortune, man as the hard-handed, industrious artisan, is himself a wonderful being indeed.