ABSTRACT
The year 1851 was truly a banner year for the British. With fastidiously arranged pomp and ceremony Queen Victoria presided at the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, London, on May 1, 1851. Popularly known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition due to the massive glass and metal frame structure containing it within its nineteen acre confines – displaying 100,000 exhibits put on by 14,000 exhibitors drawn from around the world – the exhibition was considered the eighth wonder of the world at the time. More important, it expressed an idea, the possibility of universal peace and harmony as a by-product of material, political, and social progress. Implicit in the concept of progress is perceived improvement over the past upon which the present builds as a step on the road to an even more glorious future. This vision was surely central to the passion with which Albert of SaxeCoburg-Gotha, Prince Consort and husband of Queen Victoria, tirelessly promoted the Crystal Palace Exhibition project. In the back of Albert’s mind were medieval trade fairs and – of more recent vintage – the national exhibitions held in France (held in 1798, 1801, 1802, 1806, and 1819) and the exhibitions of the German customs union, the Zollverein. Equally important were exhibits of manufactures mounted by the British Society of Arts in the 1840s. Indeed, Prince Albert became the president of the Society in 1843, working assiduously with Henry Cole, tireless promoter of the penny post, the standard gauge railway track, a school of cookery, and the Royal College of Music. Great Britain was the Workshop of the World blessed with the largest empire on the globe, possessor of the most powerful navy, staunch opponent of and victor over Napoleonic France. With the abolition of the Corn Laws and the
Navigation Acts, Britain was inexorably moving toward Free Trade, the embrace of unfettered markets at home and abroad, adhering to principles advanced by John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the advocates of utilitarianism. To Albert and his middle class allies (Whig, Radical, Peelite, those groups who eventually became the backbone of the Liberal Party), Britain was the very epitome of a progressive nation-state. Steering a middle path between French radicalism and continental absolutism, it was Great Britain’s destiny, its duty, to shoulder the burden of international leadership, showing the world how progress can be best realized. Prince Albert expressed this idea in a famous speech he gave at the Mansion House as part of the funding drive for private donations to the project:
Nobody . . . will doubt . . . that we are living at a period of most wonderful trans ition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which, indeed, all history points – the realisation of the unity of all mankind . . . the distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention . . . [and] the great principle of division of labour, which may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art.2
