ABSTRACT
Victorian studies have commonly valorized the Great Exhibition of 1851 as nineteenth-century Britain’s most remarkable celebration of burgeoning economic power, a singular expression of self-congratulatory nationalism. In topical poetry, newspaper columns, panegyrical essays, personal diaries, and hastily published biographies, The Duke of Wellington’s funeral – accurately, its stunning visual effect – was one of the most scrutinized topics of the day. The Illustrated London News, for example, made no mention of the victims and instead focused attention on the procession itself. Certainly, Wellington was in need of some reclamation after death. He was haunted throughout the middle years of his political career by the extreme unpopularity he had excited among proponents of reform in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Despite Thomas Carlyle’s class-inflected excoriations, the car itself might even be read as having contributed directly to this aura of the progress as it was transferred to the stage of Victorian London.
