Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

BRITAIN, THE EMPIRE, AND THE WORLD AT THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1851

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Edited by JEFFREY A. AUERBACH California State University, Northridge, USA and PETER H. HOFFENBERG University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, USA

© Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Britain, the Empire, and the world at the Great Exhibition of 1851 1. Exhibitions – England – London – History –19th century 2. Technological innovations – Exhibitions – History – 19th century 3. International trade – Exhibitions – History – 19th century 4. Commercial policy – History – 19th century 5. Great Britain – Foreign economic relations I. Auerbach, Jeffrey A., 1965– II. Hoffenberg, Peter H., 1960– 607.3’4’09421’09034 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Britain, the empire, and the world at the Great Exhibition of 1851 / edited by Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6241-9 (alk. paper) 1. Great Exhibition (1851: London, England) I. Auerbach, Jeffrey A., 1965– II. Hoffenberg, Peter H., 1960– T690.B1B75 2008 907.4’421—dc22 2007030166

ISBN 978-0-7546-6241-9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents List of Figures

vii

Introduction Jeffrey A. Auerbach

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Part 1 England, Exhibitions and Empire 1

Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition Paul Young

3

2

The World within the City: The Great Exhibition, Race, Class and Social Reform Kylie Message and Ewan Johnston

27

3

Defining Nation: Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851 Louise Purbrick

47

4

‘A Valuable and Tolerably Extensive Collection of Native and Other Products’: New Zealand at the Crystal Palace Ewan Johnston

77

5

‘Nothing Very New or Very Showy to Exhibit’?: Australia at the Great Exhibition and After Peter H. Hoffenberg

93

Part 2 Europe, the Orient and the Spaces in Between 6

Russia and the Crystal Palace in 1851 David C. Fisher

123

7

The Great Exhibition and the German States John R. Davis

147

8

Modern to Ancient: Greece at the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace Debbie Challis

173

9

Degrees of Otherness: The Ottoman Empire and China at the Great Exhibition of 1851 Francesca Vanke

191

Select Bibliography: English-Language Secondary Sources

207

Index

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List of Figures 3.1

‘Caractacus Unbound’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

49

3.2

‘Entrance to the Irish Court. – Western Main Avenue, South Side’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

51

3.3

Plan, A Guide to the Great Exhibition; containing a Description of every Principal Object of Interest. With a Plan, pointing out the easiest and most systematic way of examining the Contents of the Crystal Palace (London: George Routledge and Co., 1851)

53

3.4

Plan, The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Vol. I (London: William Clowes and Spicer Brothers, 1851)

54

3.5

‘The Last Irish Grievance’, Punch or the London Charivari, 21 (1851)

59

3.6

‘Altar Cloth – Sisters of Mercy’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 10 (9 August 1851)

60

3.7

Box top designed by S. McCloy of the Belfast School of Design for Mr McCracken, The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations 1851 (Newton Abbott: David and Charles Reprints, 1970)

64

3.8

‘Clarendon Ardoyne’, Mr Andrews, The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations 1851 (Newton Abbott: David and Charles Reprints, 1970)

66

3.9

‘Group in Bog-Yew’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

68

3.10

‘Bog Wood Teapoy,’ Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1 (London and New York: John Tallis, n.d.)

69

3.11

Fourdinois Sideboard, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1 (London and New York: John Tallis, n.d.)

72

7.1

Germany and Austria in the mid-nineteenth century

148

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

8.1

The Greek Court at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham

179

8.2

The US Court at the Great Exhibition, 1851

179

Introduction Jeffrey A. Auerbach

The Great Exhibition of 1851 has become the quintessential postmodernist event, a projection screen for attitudes towards Victorian Britain as well as a reflection of broader historical trends. In 1937, one year after the Sydenham Crystal Palace burned down and at the height of anti-Victorian sentiments, Christopher Hobhouse wrote, ‘As for the importance of the Great Exhibition, it had none. It did not bring international peace; it did not improve taste … first and foremost it was just a glorious show’.1 In 1951, at the centenary of the Exhibition and in the midst of Britain’s post-war reconstruction, whiggish historians viewed the Exhibition as a symbol of ‘peace, progress, and prosperity’, a holy trinity that seemed all too elusive in the wake of the Second World War.2 By the late 1960s, the Exhibition represented middle-class oppression of industrial workers.3 Following the stagflation of the 1970s, it symbolized the high-water mark of industrial values, thus raising questions about the causes of British economic decline.4 For Thatcherite historians, the Exhibition was to be lauded not as ‘the slogan of “two nations,” but of a single nation sharing a single ethos and exulting in the monumental product of that ethos.’5 For those scholars less enamoured of Thatcher’s vision, it was a legitimizing structure that served the interests of the ascendant middle class, ‘a giant counter-revolutionary measure’, ‘an immense show of strength designed to intimidate potential insurrectionists.’6 By the early 1990s, in the midst of 1 Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace (London: John Murray, 1937), pp. 149–50. 2 The phrase is from G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After (1792–1919), 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1937), p. 295. For a similar approach, see C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Commemorative Album (London: HMSO, 1951; 2nd edn, 1981); Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition, 1851 (London: Harvill Press, 1951); C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). For a broader discussion of the Festival of Britain, see Becky Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 3 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Asa Briggs, Victorian People, rev. edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 4 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 5 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 364–5. 6 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

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burgeoning consumerism, it had come to represent the birth of advertising and a commodity culture.7 The 2001 sesquicentennial of the Exhibition, which occurred in the midst of nation-building in eastern Europe and talk of devolution in Great Britain, prompted accounts of the event that focused on the idea of Britain as a constructed nation with a contested national identity. Historians characterized the Exhibition as the first truly national spectacle, highlighting the ways in which the Exhibition put the nation on display and served as a forum for discussions of Britishness.8 In so doing, they followed on the heels of a general movement in British historiography towards interrogating the meaning of British national identity.9 Concomitantly, and following the ‘imperial turn’, historians began to explore the role the Exhibition played in the cultural and economic construction of the British Empire.10 The collection of essays presented here is intended to broaden the discussion about the meaning and significance of the Great Exhibition even further, situating the event, for the first time, not just in a national or imperial, but in a global context. In Europe and the People without History, Eric Wolf encouraged historians to treat concepts such as the ‘nation’ as ‘bundles of relationships’ rather than as abstract and bounded entities.11 Not only are nations constructed, contingent and relational, they also need to be seen as enmeshed in regional, imperial, and even global webs.12 And just as the Great Exhibition prompted the ‘self-conscious reworking of fluid national and 7 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 8 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Michael Leapman, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001). See also John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), and Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 9 See, most famously, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), as well as Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1989); Antoinette Burton, ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10/3 (1997), pp. 227–48; Sula Marks, ‘History, Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), pp. 111–19; Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions, and the Idea of Britishness (London: Longman, 1998). 10 See Greenhalgh, Auerbach, and most importantly, Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Also relevant is Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Purbrick (ed.), pp. 146–78. 11 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 3. 12 The metaphor of the web is from Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and J. R.

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imperial identities’, as Peter Hoffenberg has demonstrated, it shaped identities and relations across international borders as well.13 The Great Exhibition, in short, enabled Britons to locate themselves in the context of their empire and of the broader world, even as it also attempted to incorporate much of the rest of the world into a British-centred economic orbit. Britain’s place in the world in the mid-nineteenth century has, in recent decades, been explored through a range of disciplinary approaches. Diplomatic historians have tended to focus on foreign policy and international relations.14 Postcolonial scholars in both literary studies and art history have emphasized popular cultural constructions.15 Meanwhile, economic historians such as Eric Hobsbawm have amply documented Britain’s industrial dominance, even as revisionists such as N. F. R. Crafts have made clear that economic growth was slow and that many sectors remained unindustrialized even at the time of the Exhibition.16 Nevertheless, Hobsbawm’s suggestion that early industrialization led many Britons to envision the world as a ‘kind of planetary system circling round the economic sun of Britain’17 seems well borne out by the Great Exhibition, which attempted to turn this solar dream into an earthly reality by transforming the world into economies that were either dependent on or complementary to Britain’s. In fact, such economies did develop from time to time – cotton in the southern United States before the Civil War, wool in Australia – but whatever primacy Britain had in 1851 was only partial and short-lived.18 More importantly, the essays here demonstrate that the Anglo-centred system on display at the Great Exhibition was not a coherent, subjugating spectacle, but instead a multifaceted event, the product of bilateral McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003). 13 Hoffenberg, p. xiv. 14 See Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Muriel E. Chamberlain, Pax Britannica? British Foreign Policy 1789–1914 (London: Longman, 1988); Ronald Hyman, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914, 3rd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). For a slightly earlier period, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (London: Longman, 1989). 15 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Carl Bridge and Kent Federowich, The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003). 16 Hobsbawm, pp. 134–53; N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keydar, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978). 17 Hobsbawm, p. 136. 18 See ibid., pp. 134–52; Kennedy, pp. 143–93; Michael Dintenfass, The Decline of Industrial Britain 1870–1980 (London: Routledge, 1992).

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and contested negotiations. They also move both empirically and analytically beyond previous scholarship, which has largely focused on Anglo-French and Anglo-Indian relations. Employing case studies devoted to Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the German States, Greece, the Ottoman Empire and China, they employ and shed light on the frameworks of nationalism, internationalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. There is now a significant body of scholarship that has shown museums, art collections and exhibitions to be potent mechanisms in the construction and visualization of power relationships, especially between the colonizer and the colonized.19 Jeanne Cannizzo, curator of the controversial exhibition ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989, has argued that the museum – and one might well add the exhibition – is a ‘cultural text, one that may be read to understand the underlying cultural or ideological assumptions that have informed its creation, selection and display’.20 The cultural production of knowledge though exhibitions, however, was rarely unilateral or unfailingly hegemonic. First, exhibitions were sites of cultural contact and conflict marked by mutuality, negotiation, and even ambivalence.21 They provide, therefore, a rich if not unique opportunity to fulfil Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler’s injunction to bring ‘metropole and colony, coloniser and colonised … into one analytic field’.22 In addition, as Thomas Richards has pointed out, Britain’s reach, as it were, frequently exceeded its grasp, as the information generated by the empire flowed into the metropolis at a rate far greater than it

19 See Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Expressing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Annie Coombes, Re-inventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and the Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998); Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Recent anthropological critiques of ethnographic writing, such as those by James Clifford, have likewise emphasized that ethnography is ‘always caught up in the invention rather than the representation of cultures’. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 9. 20 Jeanne Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting Cultures: “Into the Heart of Africa”’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7 (1991), p. 151, and Into the Heart of Africa (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1989). 21 On the notion of ‘ambivalence’, see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in idem, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–93. 22 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in eidem (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 15.

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could be processed, reducing the vaunted ‘imperial archive’ – in this case, the Crystal Palace – to little more than a mélange of miscellanies.23 Many of the essays presented here in fact illuminate what Peter Hoffenberg has called a counter-exhibitionary tradition.24 David Fisher, for example, shows that although the organizers’ call for exhibits emphasized machinery, manufactures and innovation, the Russian display, with substantial input from the Moscow Society of Agriculture, represented Russia as a major producer of agricultural goods, with no apologies for Russia’s inability to compete with the western European industrial nations. Even as British commentators saw the Russian exhibits as proof that entrepreneurship and industrial progress were the products of a free society and would, in the end, prevail over absolutism and militarism, Fisher writes that ‘the presence of a Russian display at the Great Exhibition testified to the desire of tsarist officials to combat Russophobia’, and that Russian observers themselves used the Great Exhibition to reflect on how a world’s fair could benefit Russia. Similarly, John Davis explains how British and German organizers were forced to work out a compromise over the pricing of exhibits. Exhibitions in the German states were ‘market-oriented institutions’, where the prices of goods could be compared. The British exhibitionary tradition, on the other hand, tended to emphasize scientific innovation, and the Royal Commission, operating in a social and political climate in which Free Trade was still a hotly contested issue, resisted the pleas of manufacturers wanting to exhibit goods for ‘cheapness’.25 In the end, British and German organizers agreed that labels could be attached to goods stating that they were being exhibited for ‘cheapness’ (or some other quality), and that manufacturers could hand out lists of prices, but that price tags could not be affixed to goods. This small, seemingly arcane dispute therefore illuminates the limits of the British-centred economic vision that was on display in 1851, and the ways in which Crystal Palace displays were the product not of the organizers’ totalizing vision, but of negotiation and compromise between British organizers and potential exhibitors around the globe. If Britain’s relations with Russia and Germany were contentious, its relations with some of its colonies, notably Ireland and Australia, ranged from ambiguous to contradictory. As Louise Purbrick points out in ‘Defining Nation: Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851’, there was frequent linguistic slippage in usage between such terms as ‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘United Kingdom’. Ireland was a ‘province’ within an ‘empire’, but also a ‘sister kingdom’ and occasionally even a ‘nation’. There were Irish exhibits, sent in by independent 23 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 1–9. 24 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, and ‘Equipoise and its Discontents: Voices of Dissent during the International Exhibitions’, in Martin Hewett (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 29–67. 25 For an overview of the free trade debate as it pertains to the Exhibition, see Auerbach, pp. 62–4, 118–21.

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local committees in Belfast, Dublin and Cork, but there was no Irish exhibit. Within the Crystal Palace itself, the contributions from Ireland were subsumed within the British display, according to Lyon Playfair’s four-part classificatory system of raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine arts. Ireland was, as Purbrick puts it, ‘received as a nation at the Great Exhibition despite being classified as a region’. The contradictory positioning of Ireland manifested itself in the descriptions of the exhibits themselves as well: on the one hand, the emphasis on the production of textiles drew Ireland ‘into a narrative of British industrial improvement’; on the other hand, observers took the furniture and arts manufactures to be signs of historical independence, embellished, as they were, with characteristic Irish symbols. In contrast, Australia proved to be one of the most disappointing colonial displays. Despite that continent’s increasing importance for Victorian Britain, Peter Hoffenberg demonstrates that it ‘had nothing very new or very showy to exhibit’. There were a number of reasons for this, including distance from London and separatist sentiments, but what Hoffenberg shows is that there was a critical lack of centralization that could have coordinated the Australian contributions, and that there was considerable confusion, perhaps even dissention, about how to portray Australia. As he writes, ‘there was very little, if any, sense of … “Australian” identity at this point’. In the end, the Australian displays were shaped as much by English officials such as Henry Cole who were interested in Australia’s unique natural history items that might have commercial uses. This imperative coincided with the desire of Australian officials to exhibit raw materials in order to develop overseas markets for the fledgling colony. They also sent publicity material such as books and maps to encourage immigration. While scholars have devoted enormous attention to Britain’s relationship with its formal empire, many of the chapters here point towards something much more akin to informal empire. Born from the difficulty of dominating certain regions militarily, ‘informal imperialism’, according to Robert Aguirre’s compelling study of Mexico and Central America in Victorian culture, ‘carved out an area of competitive advantage based largely on trade and economic policy but buttressed strongly by myriad cultural activities on the ground’.26 26 Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xv. The term was first used by C. R. Fay, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), vol. 2, p. 399. See especially John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, 6/1 (1953), pp. 1–15, and D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). More recent surveys and case studies include Peter Winn, ‘British Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century’, Past & Present, 73 (1976), pp. 100–126; Martin Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 101–21; Britten Dean, ‘British Informal Empire: The Case of China’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 14 (1976), pp. 64–81;

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These cultural activities included archaeology, ethnology, museums, freak shows, panoramas and exhibitions, all of which helped shape and inform an audience receptive to the exercise of British power across the globe. In imperial historiography, the importance of trade in the Anglo-Latin American relationship has made Latin America the focus of theories of informal imperialism, whether described as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, ‘imperialism of free trade’, or ‘business imperialism’.27 The case studies offered here expand that focus to include newly independent states such as Greece and well-established if struggling empires such as China and the Ottoman Empire. Greece’s place in Britain’s imagined cultural and geopolitical orbit was particularly ambiguous.28 Despite its recent and celebrated independence, the positioning of the Greek Court adjacent to Turkey and Egypt within the Crystal Palace marginalized Greece’s claims to be a European state and not a Middle Eastern or ‘Oriental’ one. However, there was not one Greece on display, but several, ancient and modern, the Greece of natural products such as honey and marble and the Greece of artistic products, notably Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave. Debbie Challis reads this American-made statue as a rich symbol of Greece’s international position in 1851, simultaneously referencing Greece’s long and recently ended enslavement at the hands of the Ottoman Empire and its locus as the origin of European neoclassicism. The Great Exhibition, Challis writes, both fixed and problematized national and cultural stereotypes, as ancient Greece was lauded while modern Greece was patronised and placed alongside the ‘barbarous East’. China and the Ottoman Empire were also arguably part of Britain’s cultural and economic purview in 1851. Francesca Vanke analyzes the Chinese and Ottoman objects that were displayed, contextualized by contemporary commentary about them, to complicate Said’s concept of ‘otherness’. Instead of there being ‘one monolithic, [Oriental], unchangeable other’, she asserts that China and the Ottoman Empire ‘occupied positions on what could be termed a sliding scale of otherness’. Vanke demonstrates the extent to which diplomatic and economic relationships coloured perceptions of material objects. Anglo-Chinese relations were, for most of the nineteenth century, very strained. Anglo-Ottoman interactions, by contrast, were quite cordial, especially mid-century when the Ottoman sultan undertook a wide-ranging series of reforms, called the Tanzimat, which aimed to modernize the army, the education system, and the state’s administrative infrastructure. Vanke comes Daniel Silverfarb and Majif Khadduri, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq 1929–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 27 Raymond E. Dummett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London: Longman, 1999); Gallagher and Robinson; D. C. M. Platt (ed.), Business Imperialism: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 28 See Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).

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to the ironic and important conclusion that the Ottoman Empire, despite its geographic position within the Oriental locus, did not constitute a Saidian ‘other’ at the time of the Great Exhibition, certainly not when compared with China or Russia. The final irony of the Chinese display is that the exhibits had very little to do with China at all, but had in fact been cobbled together by the British in order to give the illusion of coherence, perhaps the ultimate tribute to notions of informal empire. Regardless of their specific geographic focus, all of the essays contained in this collection develop the point that nineteenth-century Britain was, as John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson put it, following the late-Victorian imperial theorist John Seeley, an ‘expanding society’.29 Paul Young, for example, examines the Exhibition’s globalizing imperative, quoting from Prince Albert’s celebrated Mansion House address of March 1850 in which the Prince Consort expressed his conviction that the distance between nations was ‘gradually vanishing’.30 Henry Cole likewise declared even ‘an average Englishman’ to be ‘a born cosmopolite’ in his report on the result of the Exhibition.31 According to Young, the Great Exhibition ‘produced a vision which annihilated space and time’. This Anglobalization – to use Niall Ferguson’s term32 – in fact comes much closer to Immanuel Wallerstein’s model of a global capitalist system in which international connections – whether formal or informal, colonial or not – resulted in a world system characterized not just by territorial exploitation, but by uneven economic development.33 Young shows how the Great Exhibition first produced what Anne McClintock termed ‘anachronistic space’ – a space inhabited by ‘prehistoric, atavistic and irrational [people], inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity’ – and then proclaimed Britain’s capacity to regenerate these lands and people by incorporating them within Britain’s modernity. This was not, however, a consensual or peaceful process, and Young’s analysis of representations of non-Europeans people at the time of the Exhibition suggests that the limits and costs of the modernizing process were well understood at the time. This process of globalization occurred not only within the Crystal Palace and in Britain’s geopolitical relations, but throughout the city of London as well. In their chapter on ‘The World within the City’, Kylie Message and Ewan Johnston look at the ways in which metaphors of ‘the picture of the world’ moved beyond the Exhibition into the social hierarchies of the urban metropole. By encapsulating the world within the city and by offering and 29 Gallagher and Robinson, pp. 5–8. 30 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, 3 vols (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), vol. 1, p. 4. 31 Henry Cole, ‘On the International Results of the Great Exhibition’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition, Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 2 vols (London: David Bogue, 1852–53), vol. 2, p. 420. 32 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lanes, 2002), esp. pp. xxvi–xxviii. 33 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols (New York: Academic Press, 1974–89).

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legitimating a diversity of experiences, ‘the Exhibition taught everyone to look at everyone else’, thus contributing to the reconfiguration of London and its social spaces in explicitly exotic and racialized terms. In short, the Exhibition helped turn Londoners of all classes into cosmopolitans, even as it presented the world as ‘reproducible, consumable, and … fundamentally illustrative’.34 For the British, globalization also meant a specific kind of modernization. While historians have long asserted that industrialization spread from Britain to the continent, several of the chapters here document the instrumental role played by the Exhibition in that process. In Germany, for example, there were hundreds of catalogues, reports and lectures produced by socalled modernizers who aimed to identify gaps in the international market for aspiring German manufacturers, offered detailed descriptions of British machinery for emulation, and extolled the benefits of mechanization and the division of labour. Likewise in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, where the Exhibition supported modernization at a crucial moment, advertising the benefits of mass-production, promoting technology, establishing transnational contacts, and facilitating technological transfer. New Zealand provides the clearest example of the modernizing imperative as it pertained to Britain’s colonies. Ewan Johnston’s chapter traces New Zealand’s position in London’s exhibitions from 1851 to 1911, demonstrating that whereas in 1851 all New Zealand had to offer was ‘a valuable and tolerably extensive collection of native and other products’, by the late nineteenth century New Zealand had become a critical part of ‘an empire of no mean size’ and a testament to the ‘progress [of] the Anglo-Saxon race’. Johnston explains how New Zealand became a constitutive part of the construction of the Exhibition as an imperial commodity spectacle,35 as its centrality within the Crystal Palace belied its geographical location as well as the utter paucity of goods displayed. Most of the ‘few things’ that made up the New Zealand display were raw materials, and the works of art that were submitted contributed to the creation of an image of the island as a place of great natural wonder. Just a decade after its physical appropriation with the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand was still being mapped and catalogued. There was virtually no mention of the ongoing troubles with the Maori; in fact, a few representative ‘curios’ such as a carved box, some fishing hooks, and some ‘Maori flour’ were ‘proof of the progress of civilization amongst the New Zealanders’. This and many of the other essays, therefore, follow Nicholas Thomas’s lead in maintaining that only ‘localised theories and historically specific accounts’ can shed much light on ‘the varied articulations of colonising and counter-

34 For a broader exploration of some of these issues in the later-nineteenth-century context, see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 35 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 59.

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colonial representations’.36 They also suggest that one way to understand the intricate circuits that linked together Britain with its Celtic periphery, its European trading partners, its formal colonies and its informal empire is through an analysis of what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘social life of things’; that is, focusing on the things that are exchanged as well as the ‘functions’ of that exchange.37 These exchanges – of goods and information – were not, however, one-sided. If Britain used the Exhibition to represent the world, so too did its colonies and other countries use the Exhibition to represent themselves. In the final analysis, the Great Exhibition was a truly global and not just a British event. While the organizers in London clearly had their own agendas, Britain’s relationships with its settler colonies and trading partners were complex, multifaceted, protean, and very much the product of negotiation rather than an assertion of hegemony. Nation states and colonies alike were able to use the Exhibition to serve their own ends, thus demonstrating how limited and self-serving, in the end, the Exhibition’s organizers’ vision was. Only when the Exhibition is viewed from the periphery – from Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China, Australia and New Zealand – as well as from the metropole, can the full range of Britain’s global relations in the midnineteenth century be understood.

36 Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. ix. 37 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in idem (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 15.

PART 1 England, Exhibitions and Empire

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Chapter 1

Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition Paul Young

I. Anglobalization First published in 1857, Tom Brown’s School Days begins with a chapter entitled ‘The Brown Family’, in which Thomas Hughes’s narrator champions the values and actions of an exemplary body of the English population,1 one to which national history has not sufficiently attended: much has yet to be written and said before the English nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands.2

Hard-working and equally ‘hard-knocking’, these ‘homespun’ peoples are held responsible for establishing and maintaining England’s overseas glory. It is, the narrator attests, ‘the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets … whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability’.3 The security of this familial imperial order seems threatened, however, from developments within the mother country. ‘Oh young England! young England!’ exclaims Hughes’ narrator, ‘You who are born into these racing railroad times, when there’s Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year’. Such youthful dynamism, marked as it is with a profoundly different form of global perspective and propensity to travel, prompts unease. Pointing out that ‘You’re all in the ends of the earth’, the narrator is concerned to ask of his young countrymen, ‘why don’t you know more of your own birthplaces?’ The ‘racing railroad times’ are juxtaposed with ‘my time’, presented as a rural age which was regionally rooted and culturally secure: 1 ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ are used as the default marker of national identity throughout this chapter, despite the fact that so many of the sources it treats privilege England and the English over and above these terms. The decision is influenced in part by this book’s British emphasis, and in part by a desire to stress that imperial endeavour and enterprise did involve non-English parts of the union. 2 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 18. 3 Ibid., p. 21.

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and stories by heart … We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it’s all right – I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that.4

To foreground the threat of industrial modernity in terms of an attack on a traditional rural order is a recurring trope of nineteenth-century writing. Hughes is interesting because this rural order is linked with a particular form of imperial authority and conquest, one grounded in values developed over centuries’ worth of agrarian enterprise in a ‘country-side which teems with Saxon names and memories’. Used to ‘treading on heroes’, and working ‘sacred ground for Englishmen’, it is small wonder that the Browns are capable of maintaining hard-won order in the world beyond their counties.5 But the Browns’ heritage is apparently in danger of being lost, and in losing grip on its traditional English way of life, with all its memories of the emergence of a strong, martial people, young England seems in danger of losing both its national identity and its empire. As Hughes’s novel makes clear, the critique of a nation characterized by industrial advances and a burgeoning internationalist spirit found sustenance in the Great Exhibition of 1851. From its inception, the world’s first international industrial display was presented as a truly global event, one which aimed at once to celebrate the material progress humankind had made and coordinate those advances in order that the world could work together. Recent Exhibition scholarship has been concerned to point up the display’s multifarious character, correctly refusing the notion that this was a monolithic event inspired by unshakeable Victorian confidence, and drawing attention to the fact that political expediency dictated the display was not proclaimed, at an official level at least, a festival of free trade.6 It is important, then, not to iron out the historical, political and cultural complexities which informed the Great Exhibition and the diverse ways in which it was received. However, it is equally important to keep in mind that free trade’s supposed power to realize a peaceful and progressive new world order furnished the event with a grand narrative capacious and cogent enough as to enable those with a range of political leanings to embrace it. This story of a pacific, cosmopolitan shape of things was at odds with a vision of a peculiarly English empire created by the ‘hard-knocking’ exploits of the Brown army. But if modern Britain privileged the railroad above the rural, the global above the local, and commerce above conquest, the Great Exhibition bore testament to the fact that a sense of nationalist pride and missionary zeal was by no means lost from the global order with which Hughes associated the display. Set against Hughes’s condemnation of ‘young England’ as an age which was losing its national character and international standing, then, was the celebration of 4 Ibid., pp. 21–3. 5 Ibid., pp. 29, 25. 6 See, for example, Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 1–2, 22–3.

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a world super-power embarked upon a process which Niall Ferguson has recently dubbed ‘Anglobalization’. In the introduction to Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Ferguson is drawn to a vision of global commerce as expounded by Richard Cobden, leader of the Manchester School of Economics, and the popular face of Victorian free trade economics. For Cobden, the beauty of international commerce lay not only in the fact that self-interest guaranteed trade was a consensual and mutually beneficial activity, enriching all nations at the expense of none, but also that commerce acted as a ‘grand panacea’, serving to ‘inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world’.7 Quite rightly, Ferguson disputes the notion of such ‘an international system of multilateral cooperation’ arising spontaneously. Instead, he points out the coercive character of the process, drawing attention to the way in which Britain imposed its economic will through imperial interaction with nations and peoples in the non-European world. Concerned as it was to establish economic satellites which would feed with raw materials its population and manufacturing base, at the same time as providing markets for manufactured goods and capital investment, nineteenth-century Britain was never adverse to applying economic, political or military pressure to those so-called peripheral or underdeveloped regions it sought to subsume, whether by formal colonial annexation or informal free trade imperialism; gun-boat diplomacy and not mutual interest propelled much Victorian global expansion.8 However, such exertion of global hegemony can be seen, in Ferguson’s rhetoric, as ‘a good thing’. Thus explaining Anglobalization, Ferguson heralds ‘the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization’, one which he maintains tends to damage ‘hitherto privileged or protected social groups’. After Cobden, he also draws attention to the concomitant flow of Western ‘knowledge, culture and institutions’ which industrial capitalism engendered. This magnificent achievement, Ferguson opines, can be set against the slavery, famines and massacres documented by other histories of British imperialism; Anglobalization must be must be seen as proof positive that the legacy of Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’.9 Surprising in Ferguson’s analysis is the cursory attention he pays to the Great Exhibition. As this chapter demonstrates, the Crystal Palace was seen as a cartographic validation of free trade’s new world order, setting out an Anglocentric industrial and cultural mission at the same time as it further opened up the world to British hegemonic ambition. But in reading the Exhibition as an event which plotted, in the twin sense of mapped and 7 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. xviii–xix. 8 Eric Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999) provides an authoritative and compelling account of the relationship between British industrial development and global expansion. 9 Ferguson, pp. xxvii, xx, xxvi–xxvii.

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narrated, Victorian expansion in the non-European world, this chapter refuses Ferguson’s disassociation of Anglobalization from racism and xenophobia. Perhaps less surprising in Ferguson’s paean to capitalism is the fact that it takes him some 370 pages before he remarks upon ‘the lopsided nature of economic globalization’.10 In making the modern world, Britain should also be understood as instrumental in a racialized and xenophobic process which structured global inequality along lines of colour as well as cultural difference, and eradicated millions of those peoples Victorian commentators were content to term savages or barbarians. An examination of the way in which Exhibition commentary represented non-European peoples reveals a mindset which not only justified such exploitative trading relationships, but sanctioned the violence which accompanied them. Counter to its grand narrative, then, the Exhibition exposes to view the structures of feeling and exertions of power over which abstracted celebrations of an ‘optimal’ mode of production, whether orchestrated by mid-nineteenth-century free trade ideologues or modern-day neo-conservative historians, would seek to pass. II. ‘Man-akin to all the Universe’: John Bull’s Hand of Friendship Managing a sneak preview of the Crystal Palace, prior to the display’s opening, Punch was delighted to inform its readers of the sight which had met its eponymous hero’s eyes: Immediately on his first peep into the Crystal, Mr Punch found himself fulfilling the request of JOHNSON – ‘Let Observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru.’ He beheld the whole of ADAM’s race collected together for the first time since they were seated together on the plain of Shinar – shaking hands together, with JOHN BULL in their midst, instructing them in that only genuine mode of fraternising.11

Presumably, this imagined vision did not come as a surprise to Mr Punch. A year earlier, his journal had offered its readers a hint of what was to come: Now, for the first time since the world was parted By differing tongues, round Shinar’s tower of old, One nation, horny-handed and strong-hearted, The grasp of friendship out to all doth hold.12

10 Ibid., p. 372. 11 ‘Visions in Crystal’, Punch, 20 (1851), p. 188. 12 ‘The Exhibition of Industry – A Hint’, Punch, 18 (1850), p. 141.

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Punch’s emphasis upon Shinar, site of the Tower of Babel, was a recognition at once of an essential human unity, at the same time as it signalled the tribal diversity which had resulted there from the presumption of humankind. It was also a register of the widely held conceit that, in the words of one prizewinning Exhibition essayist, free trade was a divinely ordained ‘scheme of life, appointed for mankind in general’, and that in promoting its cause the Great Exhibition would prove ‘to our race a kind of compensation for the Tower of Babel’.13 Premised upon the notion that the peoples of the world not only shared the same basic wants and needs, but a propensity to exchange as well, this form of compensation for Adam’s race was sprung from Adam Smith. And if this notion was commonplace, so too was the interlinked idea that Britain had a key role to play in facilitating global economic interdependency. Upon first hearing of plans for a forthcoming international industrial display, a leading article from The Times remarked that it was entirely ‘natural’ given its commercial history that Britain would host the event. Heralding the nation as Adam Smith’s country, the leader welcomed its ‘return to a saner and more natural theory of interchange’, one which, no doubt, would ‘ere long be imitated by others’.14 For many Victorian commentators, Cobden foremost among them, Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 established Britain as a free-trading source of inspiration to other nations. And after the manner of The Times, this triumph in policy was related directly to the provenance of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Stripped of its complexities, the text was acclaimed by many Victorians as the bible for ‘a world economy whose principal object was growth … an “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”’.15 Understood thus, the Great Exhibition was celebrated as part of a wider Smithian project; it was a British-led endeavour which, in the words of Roberts Stephenson, author of a guide to the Palace and London in 1851, worked towards the removal of ‘those mischievous and absurd restrictions upon manufacturers and commerce which were the offspring of former ignorance and animosity’, thereby tending ‘to a simple system of common arrangements for the commercial world’.16 If the genius of Smith was to see beyond protectionist orthodoxies which reified national boundaries at the expense of such a simple system, the genius of the Exhibition was to make manifest this fact. In acclaiming the Exhibition as ‘a series of displays of national industry, each methodically arranged’, Stephenson emphasized that ‘many advantages will arise to the intelligent spectator, who will not fail thereby to detect the 13 J. C. Whish, The Great Exhibition Prize Essay (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, n.d.), pp. 23, 8. 14 The Times, 16 November 1849, p. 4. 15 Richard Teichgraeber, ‘Adam Smith and Tradition: The Wealth of Nations Before Malthus’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 85–106 (at p. 90). 16 Roberts Stephenson, The Great Exhibition; Its Palace, And its Principal Contents with Notices of the Public Buildings of the Metropolis, Places of Amusement, etc. (London: George Routledge and Co., 1851), pp. 13–14.

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strong and weak points in the productive power of the various countries represented’.17 As with other commentators, the value of the Exhibition was here understood to rest in its revelation of mutually beneficial difference. But the celebration of this symmetry, it must be noted, was premised upon the conviction that peoples were fundamentally the same the world over. Thus for The Economist the Exhibition had demonstrated not only that ‘similar arts are used to gratify similar wants from “Indus to the Pole”’, but that a shared ancestry, often figured in familial terms, should be capitalized upon accordingly: ‘In all there is something elsewhere desired; with all there are the means of traffic and exchange; and the “men of one blood” may be bound by commerce together in the close and endearing ties of one family.’18 Invoking humanity’s fundamental similitude in this manner bespoke a capitalist anthropological fantasy, one which asserted free trade as a means to overcome, although not overturn, the cultural and physiognomic differences which were seen to separate the peoples of the world.19 With the propensity to exchange established as a consensus gentium, the beauty as well as the simplicity of the system lay in the fact that all peoples would see that it was in their interests to exchange goods they could grow or manufacture easily for those commodities they desired but found difficult to procure. Thus understood, difference was rendered relatively superficial, and became a boon rather than a curse; it fed into a reductive yet compelling idealization of an international division of labour, one which maintained that as a result of diverse ecological factors and the disparate distribution of industrial talents, the various nations of the world could come together within a competitive, consensual and comparatively advantageous commercial nexus. Three months after it had figured England as Adam Smith’s country, then, and anticipating with excitement the revelation of a new world order such as was discerned by Stephenson, The Times was again keen to cast the Exhibition with relation to Britain’s liberal commercial policy, and the inclusive understanding of human life on earth which such liberalism signalled. While industrial conventions had been held before, it was, the paper noted with satisfaction, ‘an idea as new as it was felicitous to consider all mankind as one people, and to transform the metropolis of Britain into the hospitable rendezvous of

17 Ibid., p. 40. 18 ‘The End of the Exhibition’, The Economist, Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers’ Gazette, and Railway Monitor: A Political, Literary, and General Newspaper, 9 (London: The Economist’s Office, 1852), p. 1147 (18 October 1851). The ‘men of one blood’ quotation is derived from an 1850 speech given by Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, which became a touchstone for Exhibition commentary. See The Times, 22 February 1851, p. 8. 19 This monogenetic idealization of humankind stood against the rise in the midnineteenth century of increasingly authoritative and popular polygenetic accounts of the world. For a summary of the debates over the origins of humanity at this time, see Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 9–16.

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the world’. Bearing out this appraisal, the Illustrated London News declared that the London of May 1851 was not simply ‘the capital of a great nation, but the metropolis of the world. The Exhibition has deprived it of its local character, and rendered it no longer English merely, but cosmopolitan’. In contradistinction to Hughes’s celebratory account of English empire-building, and in echo of Punch’s vision, the paper added, ‘John Bull is no longer an ogre, but a genial and courteous gentleman’.21 As Hughes would remark, for many mid-nineteenth-century thinkers what distinguished the British was their capacity not only to see the bigger picture, but to revel in the cosmopolitan celebration of ‘glorious humanity’ which such ‘large views’ inspired. When Prince Albert had declared in his celebrated Mansion House address of March 1850 that the Great Exhibition was to offer the nations of the world ‘a new starting point’ from which to coordinate industrial enterprise, he had done so with the express belief that distances between nations were ‘gradually vanishing’, and that a unity of humankind based upon ‘national varieties’ would be the result.22 What the Crystal Palace made clear was that ‘young England’ was best placed to realize this fact, and so begin to institute this unity. Thus Henry Cole, the man who had done more than perhaps anyone else to conceive, coordinate and realize the Great Exhibition, would proclaim even ‘an average Englishman’ to be ‘a born cosmopolite’. And there was, he maintained in a lecture following the close of the show, a link to be made between this progressive internationalist spirit, the Exhibition, and his countrymen’s heterogeneous genealogy: What more natural than that the first Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations should take place among a people which beyond every other in the world is composed of all nations. If we were to examine the various races which have been concerned in the production of this very audience, we should find the blood of Saxons, Celts, Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hindoos, and probably even Negroes, flowing among it.23

Questioning the validity of national categorization, and similarly playing up the idea of a heritage marked by diversity, Daniel Defoe’s ‘The True-Born Englishman’ painted its subject as nothing more than ‘A metaphor invented to express/ A Man a-kin’ to all the Universe [original emphasis].24 Celebrating

20 The Times, 23 February 1850, p. 4. 21 Illustrated London News, 18 (17 May 1851), p. 423. 22 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, 3 vols (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), vol. 1, p. 4. 23 Henry Cole, ‘On the International Results of the Great Exhibition’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition, Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 2 vols (London: David Bogue, 1852–53), vol. 2, pp. 420–51 (at p. 420). 24 Daniel Defoe, ‘The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr’ ([London]: n.p., 1708), pp. 1–31 (at p. 13), at Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Group: http://galenet. galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO.

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such a claim to universal kinship, a lack of racial purity marked the British out at the Crystal Palace as exemplary global citizens, a people who could hold out the hand of commercial friendship to the rest of the world secure in the knowledge that the ‘mode of fraternising’ they proposed was sprung from the mixed blood which flowed through their veins. Confident in their representative status as ‘man-akins’, however, the question remained as to how and where the Victorians would exert their cosmopolitan brand of global authority? Asserting that the Exhibition was ‘essentially an embodiment of freetrade and universal-peace ideas’, William Forster’s The Closing of the Great Exhibition or, England’s Mission to All Nations indicated that having revealed the symmetry of an international division of labour, England was to take on a more substantive international role, evaluating the industrial profiles of nations and encouraging particular peoples to pursue particular economic roles: We have the commission from that Providence, which made of one blood all the nations of the earth, to soothe down national animosities, to draw closer together national bonds, to interpret national interests, to forward national objects, and to make other peoples feel we consider their prosperity ours, and that what will benefit them cannot be injurious to us.

Emphasizing that this was by no means a disinterested mission, at the same time as registering an hierarchical order of nations presided over by his own, Forster proposed England ‘designed to labour to raise other nations in the scale of social order, not only because it was benevolent, but prudent’.25 Contra the notion that free trade would spread simply via the economic example and political proselytization of the Victorians, this was a vision of global authority which saw Britain taking on a more interventional role in the realization of a new world order. And for many commentators this effort to raise other nations was to be directed towards non-European terrains, parts of the world where, in keeping with a well-worn imperial theme, John Bull noted that his more distant relatives were failing to make the most of what God had given them.26 25 William Forster, The Closing of the Great Exhibition or, England’s Mission to All Nations: A Discourse (London: John Cassell, [1851]), p. 14. 26 While it is the case that this chapter focuses upon the representation of non-European lands and non-white peoples, the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’, and ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ become problematic if we try to map them, with geographical, cultural or ‘racial’ precision, onto an external, static reality. For many Exhibition commentators, modes of socio-economic organization such as those found in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece exhibited the allegedly non-progressive traits which were associated with non-Europe. Likewise, notions of primitivism, savagery and barbarism were fluid, transferable conceptions which could be applied variously, and which should be interrogated with relation to the Victorian discourses through which they were constructed rather than the people and cultures to whom they were supposed to relate. Footnote 62 addresses in brief links to be drawn between metropolitan representations of non-European peoples and the construction of the Irish as a racially inferior (and thus expendable) people.

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III. Annihilating Space and Time Considering a process of industrial capitalist expansion which would engender the ‘universal interdependence of nations’, ‘The Communist Manifesto’ concluded a few years before the Great Exhibition that the bourgeois mode of production sought to ‘create a world after its own image’. Driven by the need to extend markets, and exploit fully the potential for economic growth afforded by manufacturing and communication technologies, industrial capitalist nations were transforming the way the world worked, and in so doing were intent upon making ‘barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West’.27 Some three years later, and considering the Crystal Palace, the Edinburgh Review was drawn to discuss the same phenomenon in similar terms. Highlighting the ‘improvidence and rapacity’ of savages, as against the prudence and utility of ‘tutored nations’, and maintaining that ‘Different degrees of refinement and not of distance, mark the distinctions amongst mankind’, the article noted that in the age of the Exhibition voluntary isolation was ‘now regarded as a crime’, and the ‘great Powers of the present day are constantly casting about on the world’s chart in search of some land, hitherto jealously guarded against all intrusion’.28 Two main points for consideration arise from these interlinked analyses. First, that seemingly in tension with the Exhibition’s idealization of ‘glorious humanity’ was this pronounced disjuncture between civilized states and barbarous or savage peoples. Second, that the institution of interdependency would see savage nations rendered dependent upon their civilized counterparts. Addressing the first point, this section looks at the way in which Exhibition commentary worked in order to produce and sustain an hierarchical understanding of human life. But it also makes clear the way in which commentators clung to the notion of fundamental similitude, and the global order it legitimized. This insistence underwrote ideas about dependency and the cultivating mission, to which the following section turns. For many commentators, what was most striking about the Crystal Palace was the fact that, in the words of one guide, it presented not only ‘the different industries of nations, but that of centuries’.29 Introducing the series of lectures in which Henry Cole would herald the mixed blood of the British, William Whewell, Royal Society fellow and co-founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was impressed by the Exhibition’s capacity to plot a global geography in temporal rather than spatial terms:

27 ‘The Communist Manifesto’, in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 221–47 (at pp. 224–5). 28 The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, 44 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), p. 590. 29 Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, 2 vols (London: John Tallis & Co., 1852), vol. 2, p. 236.

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 In the useful and ornamental arts nations are always going forwards, from stage to stage. Different nations have reached different stages of this progress, and all their different stages are seen at once, in the aspect which they have at this moment in the magical glass, which the enchanters of our time have made to rise out of the ground like an exhalation.

This magical vision was elaborated upon further, in a highly significant passage: ‘By annihilating the space which separates different nations, we produce a spectacle in which is also annihilated the time which separates one stage of a nation’s progress from another.’30 Discussing this alleged temporal juxtaposition, Whewell isolated three main stages to human life. First were ‘rude and savage’ populations. These were peoples distinguished by their capacity to labour, but nevertheless clearly lagging behind other nations, dependent as they were upon the most primitive modes of subsistence and production techniques. The industrial output of these peoples was succeeded by ‘the works of nations long civilized’, such as Persia and India. Regarding the impressively intricate and ornamental goods of the ‘gorgeous East’, Whewell was struck by a problematic question, one which he extended to his audience, and beyond them, to what he designated the ‘Western world’. Confronted by ‘Oriental magnificence’, with which ‘we’ could not compete, even the inhabitants of the Victorian metropolis were forced to ask, ‘Wherein is our superiority’?31 Pointed as it was, the question could be answered satisfactorily, however, by attending to the distribution of wealth: in the Orient, tens of thousands worked to gratify the ‘tastes of the few’, and ‘the wealth of a province is absorbed in the dress of a mighty warrior’; in the ‘Western world’, industry was focused upon ‘the wants of the many’, and ‘the gigantic weapons of the peaceful potentate are used to provide clothing for the world’. Thus, while in the East ‘savagery’ and ‘magnificence’ stood side by side, Whewell maintained that in Western societies, and no doubt he had his own in mind as foremost among them, a powerful combination of capital investment and the development of machinery was orchestrated in order to meet the needs of all.32 Different observers cast this human hierarchy in different ways, but in line with Whewell’s analysis there emerged a broad trichotomy which distinguished the European/Westerner from his Oriental and aboriginal brethren.33 In accordance with a conception of ‘Prehistoric Man’, a term which 30 William Whewell, ‘On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition, vol. 1, pp. 3–34 (at pp. 13–14). 31 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 32 Ibid., pp. 17–19. For more on the intellectual traditions, discursive procedures and imperial machinations behind this use of industrial capitalist technology as a means of ranking humanity, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (London: Cornell University Press, 1989). 33 This imagined human taxonomy altered according to the political motivations and/or individual prejudices of the commentator.

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the Victorian archaeologist and anthropologist Daniel Wilson coined in the year of the Great Exhibition, this latter category was defined as comprising specimens of humanity almost completely ‘unaffected by those modifying influences which accompany the development of nations’.34 Oriental nations, in contrast, exhibited definite signs of ‘modifying influences’, but if they were in this sense considered historical, they were also dismissed as inherently nonprogressive; their displayed goods evinced decadent cultures in which sybaritic rulers dictated the painfully labour-intensive activities of the ruled.35 What is of note, however, is not so much the particular categorizations into which these ‘backward’ peoples were seen to fall, so much as the idea of the Palace as a global chart of things which established the West, and particularly Britain, as the ‘Bearer of Progress’.36 Distinguished not only in terms of its dynamism, but by the fact that in the words of The Economist it tended to universal elevation and ‘equalisation’,37 industrial capitalist civilization was set against what David Harvey, analyzing the imperialist process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, designates as those ‘barbarians, savages, and inferior peoples who had failed to mix their labour properly with the land’.38 The temporal character of the industrial map the Palace was thus seen to produce can be understood with relation to Johannes Fabian’s work on the way in which conceptions of human time in nineteenth-century anthropological thought were brought to bear upon the production of global space. Concerned with the way in which bourgeois powers sought intellectual justification for the 34 Daniel Wilson, Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World, 2 vols (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1862), vol. 1, p. vii. 35 Oriental achievements were not necessarily dismissed in this manner. Peter Hoffenberg’s An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (London: University of California Press, 2001) makes the point that ‘some Indian technology resolved overseas, or transnational, technological dilemmas’ (p. 157). More generally, Eastern aesthetics, particularly those of the Indian subcontinent, were heralded by many observers as providing a means of re-invigorating Western, and particularly British, design standards and practice. 36 Regenia Gagnier, ‘Good Europeans, Cosmopolitans, and Decadents in the Age of Globalization’ (manuscript). Discussing the invention of progressive tradition, Gagnier notes the Victorian obsession with re-writing world historical time as a means of privileging European bourgeois civilization. She remarks that this process of temporal re-inscription served to efface the fact that Europe did not create a global economy, so much as belatedly join ‘an already existing world economy and system in which the division of labour was flourishing with commercial and financial linkages through worldwide money markets’. Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000) provides an historical analysis of Asian growth to be set against accounts of the economic development of western Europe as a wholly exceptional and internal phenomenon. 37 ‘The Exhibition – The Crystal Palace’, The Economist, 9 (4 January 1851), pp. 4–6 (at p. 5). 38 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 45.

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‘domination and exploitation of one part of mankind by another’, Fabian notes that in addition to Space, ‘the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive societies we collectively and inaccurately call the West’, also demanded Time as a means to justify their ‘colonialist–imperialist’ policies: ‘[Anthropology] promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream … In short, geopolitics has its origins in chronopolitics.’39 While the Great Exhibition promoted such a scheme, however, it was held by many to do so in a manner which did not appear to reify in the same way the temporal positions ascribed to global peoples. Thus, while much Exhibition commentary plotted just the chronological account of human life which Fabian outlines, the geopolitical order with which he associates this account could be cast in contradistinction to a stream of time mapped out in terms of irrevocable and irreconcilable human alterity. This reading finds its counter towards the end of the chapter, but for the moment what comes to the fore is that non-Europe’s failure to have properly mobilized natural and social resources did not diminish the conviction that at a basic level ‘similar arts are used to gratify similar wants from “Indus to the Pole”’. Moreover, it was not necessarily seen to undermine humankind’s fundamental propensity to exchange. According to this commercial mindset, then, non-European peoples were not seen to exist beyond the pale in any essentialist sense. It would, however, require something special in order that they might be brought within a free trade fold. And here it is important to note that if 1851 was distinguished as a time when theoretically it became possible to ‘consider all mankind as one people’, the mid-nineteenth century was seen also to mark the point at which technology made this union possible in material terms. For those visitors to Hyde Park in the summer of 1851, particularly those who wondered (hands over ears) at the steam-driven machinery displayed in the Palace’s north-west corner, this was not a point likely to go unnoticed. In declaring that the Great Exhibition produced a vision which annihilated space and time, it is significant that Whewell deployed the ‘topos’ with which nineteenth-century thought described ‘the new situation into which the railroad placed natural space’.40 Underscoring the link between the railway and industrial capitalist modernity to which Thomas Hughes would point, Karl Marx mobilized the phrase in broader terms, albeit it in a modified form. Observing that capital ‘by its very nature drives beyond every spatial barrier’, Marx wrote that ‘the annihilation of space by time’ was an ‘extraordinary necessity’ for the bourgeois mode of production as it attempted to realize the ‘physical conditions’ necessary for global networks of exchange.41 Bearing 39 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. x, 143–4, 17. 40 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 10. 41 From the Grundrisse (1857–61), cited in Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 93.

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testament to the power which would effect this expansionist drive was ‘Ariel’s Girdle’, a huge locomotive engine on display in the Palace, the name of which was incorrectly (although understandably) inspired by the seemingly accepted belief that it was Prospero’s sprite from The Tempest rather than Puck, the fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who would throw ‘a girdle round about the earth’.42 When Whewell acclaimed the ‘magic work’ performed by the ‘enchanters of our time’ in realizing the Crystal Palace, then, he did so with more than a nod to modernity’s still more impressive capacity to flatten out through industrial capitalist interdependency the temporal separation the display revealed. IV. Cultivating the World For Roberts Stephenson, the Exhibition furnished ‘a chart of the course and impulse of trade all over the world; of the developments of which it is capable, and of the direction in which those may be safely pointed’.43 Understood with relation to both the plight and potential of primitive peoples, as they existed from China to Peru, as well as the concept of an ever-shrinking world, this chart became a technology for economic emancipation. Picking up upon a link between the working world as it was reduced within the Palace and the working world as it could be united through Western technology, The Times promised that the Exhibition would ‘open men’s eyes as to what may be done and what will be done with the means in our possession’: How much more may be done with steam? How much more with railways? How much better may we arrange the intercourse of distant provinces and nations? How cheaply may we offer, and how widely may we diffuse, the ennobling pleasures hitherto confined to the wealthy few?44

If such questions could be addressed to bourgeois powers in general, they could be answered by Britain in particular. Eric Hobsbawm notes that its early industrialization prompted a nineteenth-century dream of the world as a ‘kind of planetary system circling round the economic sun of Britain’.45 While the displays of other European powers, as well as the rapidly industrializing United States, made clear such absolute hegemony would not be realized, the manifestly stagnant character of aboriginal and Oriental productions did indeed encourage a vision of the Victorian metropolis as the manufacturing hub around which other economies might profitably turn. And understood on the

42 See A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i.175). Charles Dickens makes the same mistake in Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 180. Despite his declared dislike of the display, the fact Dickens was writing the novel as the Exhibition went on may explain this error. 43 Stephenson, p. 40. 44 The Times, 11 January 1851, p. 4. 45 Hobsbawm, p. 114.

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basis of common wants, comparative advantage and consensual exchange, this industrial capitalist enterprise could be presented as the means with which to liberate non-European peoples from primitivism and stagnation, freeing them up in a dramatically regenerative manner to be borne along in an historical current headed up by Britain. In order to effect this regeneration, though, it was necessary that Britain look to global peripheries for nature, not culture. Volume Three of the Exhibition’s Official Catalogue listed the contributions of Her Majesty Pomare, Queen of the Society Islands, as comprising the following: ‘8 fine mats, 5 bonnets, 3 pieces white cloth, and a “hinai” or Indian vase.’ However, readers of the Catalogue were presented with an analysis of what these objects from the Society Islands comprised, rather than a discussion of what they signified. The artefacts were stripped of any indigenous cultural resonance and offered up not as curios or exotica, but as raw materials, complete with the scientifically rigorous binomials accorded them by natural history; the mats were analyzed and fixed as ‘a variety of the Pandanus odoratissimus of Linnaeus’, while the head-dresses, it was ascertained, were made using a ‘plant commonly known in these islands by the name of pia, arrow-root by the English, Taca pumalifida by botanists’.46 Thus any native significance of these items was dismissed, and they were rendered available as materials to be worked up into commodities by industrial capitalist manufacturers. And what occurred here in the Catalogue enacted a pronounced Exhibitionary drive to strip nonEuropean communities of cultural and historical significance in order that they might be easily and profitably assimilated into a global economy. In this way the Crystal Palace served at once to coordinate, naturalize and celebrate a process of industrial capitalist expansion which would see, in the terms of the ‘Manifesto’, ‘barbarian and semi-barbarian nations’ become the countryside to Britain’s town. Surveying the displays of nations which he considered to have failed in their duty to combine properly labour and land, John Bull was thus encouraged to isolate the raw materials which would prove useful to his own nation, and to ignore anything else. For those aboriginal peoples considered to have remained outside the ‘modifying influences’ of history, this effort to efface indigenous meaning was relatively uncomplicated. In an article entitled ‘Foreign and Colonial Departments – Aboriginal States’, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace informed its readers of the substantial inferiority of the productions of ‘less civilised races’.47 But even the ‘poor treasures of the primitive man’s ingenuity’ made manifest the ‘enormous’ quantity and value of raw materials with which nature had blessed him. Understood in terms of what they might grow, everyone from the ‘Negro’ to the ‘Esquimaux’, and from the ‘Kaffir’ to ‘the half-amphibious islander of the Pacific’, could be found a place within a nexus of exchange enabled by Victorian industry and transportation. 46 Official Catalogue, vol. 3, p. 1428. 47 Tallis’s History, vol. 2, pp. 128–9.

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As Whewell had made clear, Oriental productions were harder to dismiss than the primitive attempts of the aboriginal. Notwithstanding, the same industrial capitalist logic was applied in precisely the same way. Recognizing this imperative, and rehearsing the encountered understanding of the bourgeois mode of production as one which was distinguished by progress, utilitarianism and catholic entitlement, a fictional account of a trip to the Exhibition reminded its readers that ‘the East is a land of despotism’, sorely missing in those ‘common comforts – in those articles which all classes need’.48 Since this want was the result of sociological and not ecological factors, however, it could be rectified. While the Indian court bespoke ‘all that romance has said of Oriental luxury’, then, The Crystal Palace instructed its readers that the practical value of the display organized by the East India Company lay in the scientifically verifiable realism of the raw materials there garnered: ‘for though less striking, upon picturesque grounds … they are perhaps of even higher interest to the future destinies of our vast Indian empire.’49 Emphasizing this point, the article continued by noting that the introduction by British colonial rule of railways and roads would open up to metropolitan manufacturers hitherto undeveloped sources of ‘cotton, sugar, rice, linseed, hemp, and other staples’.50 This was a mindset which appealed to the logic of the ledger and not the allure of the literature; it cared little for the historical spectacle of imperial opulence, and cared everything for progressive commercial relationships which supported domestic industry at the same time as promoting subcontinental welfare.51 And while territories formally annexed by Britain were obvious targets for such industrial capitalist penetration and integration, the Victorians did not look only to their colonial possessions for raw materials. As well as sub-Saharan African and South American terrains, Egypt and Turkey were seen to stand out as examples of Eastern nations which, in the words of one Palace commentator, had been assigned by nature an agricultural role in ‘the territorial division of labour’.52 Considered in terms of their future interests, 48 Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (London: Houlston & Stoneman, n.d.), p. 161. 49 The Crystal Palace and its Contents; Being an Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), p. 100. 50 Ibid., p. 103. 51 For more on the diverse ways in which Exhibition commentary responded to the display of goods from the Indian subcontinent, see Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 146–78. For a particular emphasis upon the conceptualization of the industrial capitalist mission to India with which the Exhibition can be linked, see my ‘“Carbon, Mere Carbon”: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace and the Mission to Make Sense of British India’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29/4 (December 2007), pp. 343–58. 52 Tallis’s History, vol. 2, p. 133. Further to note 26, it should be noted that nations such as Spain or Greece could be aligned with these Eastern nations as ‘naturally’ agricultural terrains.

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rather than their past barbarisms, the Oriental and the aboriginal alike were to be born again upon terrains rendered tabula rasa by the accomplishments of modernity. In exegesis of the market’s self-regulating ‘invisible hand’, Adam Smith famously declared that he had ‘never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good’.53 Figured with relation to the socioeconomic inadequacies of primitive peoples, however, market intervention was not only excused, but deemed necessary if global resources were to be mobilized according to the natural order of things and these peoples raised from their positions of stagnation. Moreover, and as William Forster had made clear, such intervention was prudent as well as philanthropic. Thus The Crystal Palace advised that ‘increased intercourse’ would render the peoples of the Indian subcontinent ‘better customers for the manufactures, which we can produce so good and so cheap’, while Tallis’s History noted that in encouraging less civilized nations to produce raw materials ‘our interests as manufacturers and merchants, and consumers, coincide happily with our duties as men’.54 The ‘duties’ thus performed by the Victorians were not simply cast in material terms. ‘To induce all the world to become customers and consumers would appear to be the wisdom of our country and our age’, remarked William Felkin, before noting the mutual advantages of bringing the Anglo-Saxon, the Chinese, the Hindoo, and the Hottentot together. Expanding upon this point, however, the newly appointed Mayor of Nottingham and displayer of lace at the Exhibition was careful to register that as ‘motives of self-interest’ pressed the ‘half civilized’ into trade, so too their ‘minds will gradually open to higher influences’, and the wisdom of Britain in non-commercial aspects of life would become clear. Commerce, Felkin explained, was ‘the Handmaid of Christianity’, effecting mental and moral as well as physical improvement.55 Comfortable that Victorian laws, values and beliefs were right, Exhibition commentators foresaw a time when other peoples’ were no longer wrong. Thus the commonly held Cobdenite vision of free trade as a ‘grand panacea’ saw the Smithian mantra of mutual benefit supplanted in favour of a one-way exchange between the metropolis and the periphery. And just as the incorporation of primitive nations into a modern international division of labour was figured as a pacific process, so too this process of cultural assimilation and elevation was cast in consensual terms. While Thomas Hughes might fear that ‘young England’s’ cosmopolitanism threatened national identity, other commentators maintained that these instincts would ensure the extension of Victorian values and institutions. Reflecting upon England’s ‘mission’ to ‘extend her civilization over the greatest part of the world’, the Swedish feminist and author Frederika 53 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), vol. 1, p. 456. 54 The Crystal Palace, p. 103; Tallis’s History, vol. 2, p. 129. 55 William Felkin, The Great Exhibition of 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations: Its Probable Influence Upon Labour and Commerce (London: Arthur Hall, n.d.), pp. 13, 29, 30.

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Bremer was led to highlight not only the ‘sublime benevolence of her national character which so strengthens her human nature’, but also ‘the high degree of culture possessed by England that adapts her to be the cultivator of the world’.56 According to this representative view at least, by inducing global trade Britain succeeded in doing far more than extending a mode of production. Some fifty years after the Great Exhibition, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow would bemoan imperial ambition as little more than ‘robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind’: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it … an unselfish belief in the idea.57

Here, Conrad’s modernist sensibility refused the belief in organic harmony which pre-dated it; what emerged at the Crystal Palace was the notion of a mission which elided metropolitan gain with an unselfish belief in the idea of regeneration. This was not a conquest of the earth, but rather a means by which those inhabitants of the world with ‘a different complexion or slightly flatter noses’ than their Victorian counterparts could be reunited with the earth and their Western relatives in productive and progressive ways. Furthermore, the process of economic elevation was presented not simply as an opportunity to enrich the world materially, but also to enlighten non-Europeans culturally; as Marlow’s aunt had it, commercial contact afforded a chance to wean ‘those ignorant millions from their horrible ways’.58 Understood thus, ‘to consider all mankind as one people’, as The Times had figured the Exhibition’s rationale, was to create a world after the image of the Victorians. V. Exterminate all the Brutes Contra the idea that this civilizing mission tended towards the ‘equalisation’ of humankind, the word ‘after’ should be interpreted in its dual sense of ‘like’ and ‘behind’. Discussing the formation of the capitalist world-economy, Immanuel Wallerstein notes that the ‘concept of a neutral “universal” culture to which the cadres of the world division of labour would be “assimilated” (the passive voice being important here) hence came to serve as one of the pillars of the world-system as it historically evolved’. While Niall Ferguson recognizes that the actuality of capitalist expansion was not passive, in setting ‘Anglobalization’ apart from racism and xenophobia, and the slavery, famines and massacres with which he associates such modes of thought, he appears to afford capitalism the status of just such a neutral ‘universal’ culture, and 56 Frederika Bremer, England in 1851 or Sketches of a Tour in England (Boulogne: Merridew, 1851), pp. 64–5. 57 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 31–2. 58 Ibid., p. 39.

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suggests that in making the modern world Britain successfully regenerated the non-European world. Wallerstein refuses both the abstracted and complacent manner in which Ferguson understands capitalism and the way in which it took hold of the world. Capitalism as an anthropological fantasy was fleshed out as fact by those in positions of power, and it served their ends: There was a catch to universalism. It did not make its way as a free-floating ideology but as one propagated by those who held economic and political power in the world system of historical capitalism. Universalism was offered to the world as a gift of the powerful to the weak. Timeo Danaos at dona ferentes!59

This gift harboured racism, by which Wallerstein means those ‘allegations that genetic and/or long-lasting “cultural” traits of various groups’ which served to promote and sustain ‘the hierarchization of the work-force and its highly unequal distributions of reward’.60 For Wallerstein, as for Marx, capitalism’s capacity to forge connections on the global stage resulted in a world system characterized by territorialized exploitation and uneven development. Discussing the imperialist penetration of non-Europe as it continued throughout the nineteenth century, and arguing that it saw the making of the ‘third world’, Mike Davis notes that while at the time of the French Revolution the differences in living standards between the ‘French sans-culotte and Decan farmer were relatively insignificant’, by the end of Victoria’s reign ‘the inequality of the nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irreconcilably divided’.61 Serving as it did to embed Anglobalization as a mission within British politics and culture, the Great Exhibition can also be understood as an historical event which played its part in institutionalizing this division. This is not to propose that the ravages and wrongs of nineteenth-century industrial capitalist expansion were located solely in the non-Western world.62 Neither is it to claim that the representation of the non-European world at the Crystal Palace was a necessary precursor to the Victorian penetration of this world. But it is to insist that racism, as it is defined by Wallerstein, was deployed by Exhibition commentary in a way which further opened up terrains designated as barbarian to a 59 Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1995), p. 85. 60 Ibid., p. 78. 61 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), p. 16. 62 Whether at a global or a local level, uneven development is capitalism’s hallmark, and the decimated landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland bore witness to the fact that industrial capitalist penetration exploited and starved peoples whatever the colour of their skins, and however close they were situated to the Victorian metropolis. Late Victorian Holocausts is an analysis of the way in which free trade economics, industrial capitalism and climate combined in order to decimate tropical humanity, but in it Davis draws useful comparisons between the imperial practices and discriminatory mindset bound up with famine, whether it occurred in sub-Saharan Africa or Ireland. See especially pp. 31–2.

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process of imperialist re-territorialization; a process which prioritized metropolitan gain, concealed the cost to the peripheries it created, and must be understood as a part of, not apart from, the robbery and violence Conrad would later associate with the scramble for Africa. Recognizing that the Crystal Palace was part of this project to exploit lands and peoples as motors for bourgeois development, Marx and Engels remarked that the display provided ‘striking proof of the concentrated power with which modern large-scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, society and national character among all peoples’.63 As the ‘Manifesto’ had it two years before, such demolishment was effected figuratively with the ‘heavy artillery’ of cheap commodities. But there was a literal brutality behind this metaphorical register of industrial capitalist coercion. Not all metropolitan commentators bought into the idealization of universal interdependence to which the Palace was seen to give material form. Giving the lie to celebrations of Victorian expansion as a pacific and consensual process, and casting it instead as one of exploitative and violent imposition, Punch’s ‘Business and the Bayonet’ can be read as a pointed critique of the way in which industrial capitalism dressed up its exertion of profit-hungry power in the missionary garb of redemption. The article began by informing its readers that with the coming of the Great Exhibition the following summer, London would be ‘thronged with foreigners’, many of whom would be ‘wilfully obtuse to the excellencies of our manufactures’. It was then drawn to question why shop-keepers might not employ armies ‘for the civilising benefits of trade’?64 Such a body of men, it continued, could be deployed in order to ‘lay hold of any foreigner, and carrying him to their Mart, command him at once to get rid of his cash and his barbarian ignorance’. After all, Punch insisted, with the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the front of its mind, this action was reflected by Victorian policy at a global level. Thus was the Manchester dream of ‘every Chinaman in a night-cap of cotton’ associated with the ‘percussion caps of English infantry’, and the opening of trading accounts with Japan linked to negotiations conducted via howitzers. And thus it was that Punch reminded its bourgeois readership that commerce was conducted not only on the terms of the metropolis, but, in the words of the ‘Manifesto’, ‘on pain of extinction’.65 There was, however, something particularly disingenuous about the journal’s apparent concern at Victorian violence on the global stage; if in this instance Punch served to undermine Exhibition rhetoric with the reality of economic expansion, the

63 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, May–Oct 1850 (Marxists.org Internet Archive, 22 April 2005), at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1850/11 64 It should be noted that, with a typical display of Victorian anti-Semitism, the shop-keepers Punch had in mind were Jewish. The connection drawn by the journal between such actions and Britain’s overseas economic policy, however, suggest a more generic link between commerce and coercion. ‘Business and the Bayonet’, Punch, 19 (1850), p. 234. 65 ‘The Communist Manifesto’, p. 225.

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articles it included elsewhere can be considered alongside a broad range of Exhibitionary texts which threw into doubt the display’s anthropological fantasy, ridiculing John Bull’s civilizing mission not because of the coercive way in which it was carried out, but because of the ‘barbarian ignorance’ which it expected could be overcome.66 In thus questioning humanity’s capitalist similitude, such texts both contributed to and legitimized the ‘extinction’ which went hand in hand with expansion. Explaining what he means by ‘racism’, Wallerstein disassociates the term from ‘xenophobia’: ‘Xenophobia was literally fear of the “stranger”. Racism within historical capitalism had nothing to do with “strangers”. Quite the contrary.’67 Wallerstein argues that if the former sought to include as a means to exploit, the latter sought to other as a means to exclude. Taking on board this distinction, it remains important to see both modes of thought as two sides of the same discriminatory coin. Or, put another way, if it was racism which used the bayonet as a means of effecting exploitation via inclusion, then it was xenophobia which impelled and excused its more extended use. With this qualification in mind, it is significant to note that while Exhibition commentary addressed thus far has been understood in terms of a racist ideology, London’s hosting of the first international industrial display inspired an enormously diverse and widely disseminated body of xenophobic reactions. In contradistinction to accounts of John Bull’s genealogical and friendly cosmopolitanism, then, ran representations of foreigners informed by Victorian fascination, fear and loathing. Here difference, whether cultural or biological, was figured with relation to mutual incongruity rather than economic concord, and if Europeans were at the receiving end of much of this parochial hostility and mistrust, it was the barbaric non-Europeans who were marked out for particular discrimination. Discussing these representations, Auerbach notes the John Tenniel cartoon featured in Punch two months before the display’s opening, and ironically entitled ‘The Happy Family in Hyde Park’. In this picture, the Crystal Palace was rendered a cage displaying primitive peoples, in the exotic form of ‘a Chinese, an American Indian, a Turk wearing a Turban, and a bushy-haired Russian’, for the entertainment of their European brethren.68 Tenniel’s cartoon embodies the way such peoples, typically including other Asian races and cannibalistic 66 This reading sits very much in line with George Stocking’s work in Victorian Anthropology (London: The Free Press, 1987). Here, Stocking discusses political economy as a discipline associated with a nineteenth-century desire to distinguish between global peoples, ordering ‘racial’ and cultural difference hierarchically, and concretizing an antithesis between savagery and civilization. This leads him to claim that ‘the arena of free trade in which the pursuit of individual advantage operated automatically for the good of all was quite explicitly the “universal society of nations throughout the civilized world”’ (p. 32). If what follows this footnote in the main body of the essay supports Stocking’s argument, what has preceded it throws into question, at least at a rhetorical level, the proposal that free trade was a global order aimed explicitly and exclusively at civilized society. 67 Wallerstein, p. 78. 68 Auerbach, p. 159.

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aboriginals from Australasia, were objectified at once as amusing and threatening incongruities. Thus Henry Mayhew looked forward to the arrival in 1851 of ‘the sight-seers of all the world’, singling out in particular those ‘colourful guests’ such as the curvaceous Hottentot Venus from South Africa, the South-East Asian polished ‘up like a boot’, the Native American complete with hatchet and war-paint, and the New Zealand cannibal along with his dinner of baked missionary.69 Providing a counter to the nervous excitement such commentary generated, as well as correctly realizing that the occasion of the display would not see London overrun by exotic peoples, The Family Herald poured scorn on such enthusiasm. ‘Who, after all, will come to the World’s Fair’, it asked; ‘From the three hundred millions of Chinese, how many? Some half-dozen pair of cat’s eyes. From the hundred millions of Hindoos, how many? Some dozen or two of leather-skinned Pagans at most.’ It carried on in much the same vein, questioning whether ‘Africa will send any of her niggers’ or the Emperor of Dahomey any ‘of his amazons, or his slaves’?70 Whether they were overtly hostile, or whether they couched hostile sentiment as amusing incongruity, xenophobia was deployed by Victorian commentators in a manner which undercut fundamental human similitude and refused John Bull’s acclaimed cosmopolitanism. But more than this, in projecting the idea of such barbarians within the metropolis, this commentary tapped into and encouraged the feeling that these peoples simply did not belong within a modern industrial order. As such, it prompted commentators to shift the focus of their attention, leading them to question not the products but the peoples with which market society could operate. The aforementioned article from Tallis’s History suggested that by making the ‘highly civilised man’ familiar with the industrial potential of uncivilized peoples, and thus making clear that commerce enabled him ‘to place them on his level’, the Exhibition would ‘unquestionably tend to allay the melancholy feeling too prevalent among us, that numerous portions of our race should be doomed by Providence at the approach of their more instructed brethren’.71 In contrast to such optimism was the melancholia inspired in one contributor to a compendium of Exhibition writing by the display of two Iowan Native Americans: ‘There is something cruel and ostentatious in the exhibition of these two poor Red-skins. It is nothing but a trophy. They are the slaves chained to the car of the conqueror; they are the shadow of the old races that the victorious and implacable civilisation of the West crushes in its progress.’72 The two Indians in question were models exhibited at the American stand 69 Henry Mayhew, 1851; or, the Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and Family who came to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’ and to See the Great Exhibition (London: D. Bogue, 1851), pp. 1–2. 70 ‘The Approaching Festival of All Nations’, The Family Herald: A Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement, 9 (1851), pp. 12–13 (at p. 12). 71 Tallis’s History, vol. 2, pp. 128–9. 72 Dr Lardner, The Great Exhibition and London in 1851 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852), pp. 580–81.

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and belonging to George Catlin, painter, ethnologist and exhibitor of Native Americans throughout western Europe in the 1840s and 1850s.73 And given the representations of such peoples as impossibly irrational and instinctively violent, it was no surprise that not everyone in mid-nineteenth-century Britain bemoaned the devastating results of such progress. It was Catlin’s display of live Indians at London’s Egyptian Hall in the 1840s to which Charles Dickens had referred in his virulent essay ‘The Noble Savage’. Here, Dickens refused either common humanity or the possibility of regeneration, marking out in homogenous terms such ‘bloodthirsty’ peoples as ‘mere animals’, and signalling the likelihood of their eradication ‘in the course of this world’s development’: ‘I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth’.74 The ruthless logic underpinning Dickens’s disregard for Catlin’s Indians, which he applied to ‘bushmen’ as to Zulus, was picked up in a devastatingly calculating way by an article which appeared in The Economist. Entitled ‘Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition’, the article cast the display in familiar fashion, presenting it as a ‘result of those general laws which govern the industry of mankind, and determine the production and distribution of wealth. It is cosmopolitan’.75 But the journal included a significant qualification to this apparent internationalism, making clear as it did so that the economic imperative of British overseas expansion could not be jeopardized by those peoples who stood in its way. ‘When we have savages for our neighbours as in Caffreland’, the article noted, ‘we seem to have no other alternative than to keep them at bay, or exterminate them. They have nothing to give us in exchange for our commodities, and we can get nothing from them’.76 Thus was Kurtz’s cry of ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ foreshadowed, and John Bull’s mission revealed to be little more than an ‘idea at the back of it’.77 For Anne McClintock, the Great Exhibition revealed a global geography characterized by ‘anachronistic space’, by which she means a space inhabited by peoples ‘prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity’.78 It does not follow, however, that anachronism necessarily tends to inherent incongruity and exclusion. Much of this chapter has been given over to the way in which the Palace worked to produce ‘anachronistic space’, only to proclaim Britain’s capacity to regenerate such 73 See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 275–9. See his chapter ‘The Noble Savage Reconsidered’ (pp. 268–87) for a more general survey of the display of non-European peoples in London throughout the nineteenth century. 74 Charles Dickens, ‘The Noble Savage’, Household Words, 7 (1853), pp. 337–9 (at p. 337). 75 ‘Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition’, The Economist, 9 (17 May 1851), pp. 531–2 (at p. 532). 76 Ibid., p. 532. 77 Conrad, p. 87. 78 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 56, 40.

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lands and their peoples by incorporating them within the historical moment of modernity. Pace Thomas Hughes, then, the Great Exhibition articulated the concept of a British imperial mission to raise up the non-European world after the image of the Victorian metropolis. But rendering problematic this mission as it was overwhelmingly characterized was the idea that ridding nonEuropean peoples of their anachronistic economic modes and cultures might not be a consensual and pacific process. Pace Hughes and Niall Ferguson, then, the process of Anglobalization which the Exhibition announced bore with it the need for the ‘hard-knocking’ imperial prowess of the Browns. And such violence was not necessarily motivated by a drive towards inclusion. Rendering the mission impossible was the notion that some peoples, whether for biological and/or cultural reasons, were unsuited to industrial capitalist modernity. Describing Europe as ‘absolutely the end of History’, and Asia as the beginning, Hegel famously declared of the African that ‘A people who refuse the rendezvous of History … that people is finished; you can put it in the Museum’.79 Furnishing in Prince Albert’s words ‘a new starting point’ on which to base global order, the Great Exhibition announced its own liberal capitalist ‘end of History’. But in so doing the event posed a question to its metropolitan audience which ran counter to its celebrated cosmopolitan ambition: could all peoples really be included within this new world order? Whether they were melancholic or relieved by the prospect, representations of non-European peoples and their material cultures in 1851 suggest that for many Victorians the answer was no. The display of these peoples at later international exhibitions, offered up to the museum as anachronisms unfit for the market, anthropological ‘shadows’ to be crushed in the progress of Western modernity, bears chilling testament to the fact that these Victorians were right.80

79 Cited in George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 32. 80 In the light of recent moves in exhibition studies to point up the dialogical and fluid way in which identities were constructed and contested at world’s fairs, this concluding point appears somewhat reductive. But it is motivated by the fact that the years following 1851 did witness the systematic extermination of so many nonEuropean peoples as their lands and labour were incorporated into a London-based world economy. Such global slaughter was excused by the racist/xenophobic Victorian mindset which has been addressed here, and we must be careful that in revising our understandings of exhibitions we do not lose sight of their capacity to encode such crudely reductive modes of thought.

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Chapter 2

The World within the City: The Great Exhibition, Race, Class and Social Reform Kylie Message and Ewan Johnston

In his speech at the inaugural ceremonies for the forthcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago on 1 May 1892, Director-General George R. Davis expressed the hope of the organizers ‘that this great Exposition may inaugurate a new era of moral and material progress, and our fervent aspiration that the associations of the nations here may secure not only warmer and stronger friendships, but lasting peace throughout the world’.1 This statement reiterated the earliest rhetoric used to frame the Great Exhibition of 1851, and has marked similarities with the address made by Prince Albert on 21 March 1850 at the Mansion House, in which he stated that ‘the realisation of the unity of mankind’ was to be achieved because ‘[t]he distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within the reach of everybody’.2 The studied similarity of these speeches demonstrates how consciously instrumental the international exhibitions and world’s fairs became in the decades following the Great Exhibition. These events had a fundamental influence over the creation, legitimation and normalization of the class-based colonial world order that existed beyond the space of the fair. As Albert’s comments indicate, economic progress, democracy and social civilization were presented as hallmarks of the Great Exhibition that were understood to contribute to global solidarity through the expansion of an increasingly shared marketplace. However, the exhibitions were also designed to benefit the national good. This was to be achieved by motivating the expression of pride in national products and characteristics, and through offering inclusive new forms of social experience that employed techniques of entertainment and 1 Chicago Record, p. 37, in Meg Armstrong, ‘“A Jumble of Foreignness”: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions’, Cultural Critique, 22–25 (Winter 1992–93), pp. 199–250, at p. 210. 2 Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, 5 vols (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876), vol. 2, p. 247.

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delight that would appeal, in particular, to the middle and working classes. In this newly created instructive public sphere, ‘all ranks may mingle’ and all (even ‘the workmen and workwomen of the world’) ‘may learn and all may profit from what they see’.3 The spirit of this promise was captured by the Illustrated London News, in an article written a month after the opening of the Exhibition. Not only does this extract indicate the overlaps between imperialism and class reform within the Crystal Palace, but also the significance of the Exhibition as a lesson in looking – not only at the Exhibition’s contents, but also at the society reflected as much in its walls as in its exhibits: The Great Exhibition continues its prosperous career. The crowd of the wealthy, to whom money is no object of concern, has been succeeded by the crowd of respectable people, to whom shillings are matters of importance. The same good feeling is displayed by the new-comers as was exhibited by their predecessors; and what is perhaps as gratifying as any of the pleasant incidents connected with the rise and progress of this happily realised idea, is the fact that there is a real fraternity between the two classes of visitors. … As yet the Exhibition is in its second stage only. A great bulk of the British working-classes have not made their appearance in it; nor can it be supposed that any large numbers of foreign artisans have yet found their way across the Channel. When these arrive, the Exhibition will have achieved its last, and perhaps greatest, stage of usefulness, importance, and popularity. The same amalgamation of people of all ranks and classes will then, as now … continue to render the Great Exhibition the most instructive and memorable spectacle of our time, or of any time in the history of civilization.4

The Great Exhibition has continued to be understood as a key component in the promotion of the British Empire to the globe and as instrumental in the programmes of social reform and cultural modernization developing at the time. In this chapter, we examine the points of intersection existing between the discourses of imperialism and class reform, and explore their ongoing influence on London life. We look, especially, at the way in which metaphors describing the ‘picture of the world’ moved beyond the Exhibition and into the social hierarchies of the urban metropole. In offering an image of culture that was perceived as advantageous to the education of non-English visitors, the newly emerged English working classes, and also the middle classes (which Matthew Arnold decried as ‘shallow’), the Exhibition taught everyone to look at everyone else. Not only did the ‘world’ appear encapsulated within the city, but it offered and legitimated a diversity of experience and new ways of talking about class that contributed to the reconfiguration of London and its social spaces in explicitly exotic and racialized terms.

3 Lord Carlisle in Asa Briggs, ‘Exhibiting the Nation’, History Today, 50/1 (2000), pp. 16–25, at p. 19. 4 Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 476.

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Picturing the World: ‘We have no need to go abroad to study ethnology’ While issues of race, class and reform come together in the mid-nineteenth century generally, they can be understood as coalescing at the 1851 Great Exhibition where imperial discourses, a new concern for national aggregation, and the new techniques and taste for visuality, mass consumption and mass travel were showcased and experienced to such magnitude for the first time. Contemporary accounts of the Great Exhibition also provided ample publicity and new audiences for the Exhibition as a global event. The new technologies of transnational mobility that were enabling the project of colonialism to spread faster and further also facilitated a greater transfer and exchange of information, so that the stuff of the daily newspapers – the stories, editorials, letters, graphic illustrations and caricatures – were finding an enlarged audience; as were the travel accounts, memoirs and guides that proliferated at this time to accompany the also expanding fashion of private travel.5 However, while these textual and illustrated images are useful on the one hand for representing the level of general interest in the events and activities of the Great Exhibition, they also demonstrate the way in which fabricated images of otherness come to be accepted as having a factual basis. This process occurs through repetition, so that over time the short-hand characteristics used in caricature become recognized, normalized, and therefore incorporated into established power relations. This process frames exaggerated stereotypes of otherness and existing prejudices to reiterate and justify the application of Western systems of order and civilization on unruly subjects. For example, John Leech’s series of cartoons and sketches, Memorials of the Great Exhibition – 1851, published in Punch, include depictions of both foreign and local visitors to the Exhibition that both reflected and contributed to the creation of otherness, in terms not only of race and class, but also of gender. Such examples also show that the titles or captions that accompany these illustrations (as well as photographic and other pictorial souvenirs) further contribute to the naturalization of difference. Meg Armstrong explains that these accompanying texts ‘establish in memory the general characteristics of each class of human being and … establish preferences among exotic peoples on the basis of custom, aesthetics, and physical traits observed at the fair’.6 Integral to the emerging and interconnected modern economies of exoticism and commodification was the preference for visuality. This was apparent in the Crystal Palace’s glass architecture and resonated throughout all aspects of the Exhibition. Visitors were encouraged to observe each other as if the people

5 Examples include the chronicles penned by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens and others (often first published in newspapers and other periodicals); the graphic illustrations and caricatures offered by cartoonists including George Cruikshank, Thomas Onwhyn, John Leech and other contributors to periodicals including Punch as well as to books; the witticisms of Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and others; and the observations and analysis recorded by a multitude of travel diaries and memoirs. 6 Armstrong, p. 216.

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were part of the spectacle for consumption, and this is reflected in the many accounts of this and later exhibitions that describe the crowds as much as they do the objects on display. In an episode in London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew tells of a street seller who, upon being stopped from selling his illustrated postcards of the Crystal Palace, entered the Exhibition with the goal of watching the crowds.7 Mayhew’s observations may themselves be indicative of this taste for the visual and the everyday,8 and London Labour and the London Poor is often described as the first interview-based ethnographic study of the poor (indeed, John Marriott contends that Mayhew did more than any other to ‘discover the poor’9). Mayhew himself described his actions as those of a ‘traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor … of whom the public had less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth’.10 Also commenting on the rapidly increasing taste for local class-based exoticism, an article entitled ‘Passing Faces’ in Dickens’ Household Words in 1855 makes the increasingly typical comment that: ‘We have no need to go abroad to study ethnology’ … ‘A walk through the streets of London will show us specimens of every human variety known’ … ‘Life, and all its boundless power of joy and suffering – this is the great picture book to be read in London streets’.11 This text and others like it presented an image of London as a colonial hub that attracted visitors from all corners of the globe. This approach reflected the framework put in place by the Exhibition’s commissioners, including Henry Cole, who ‘found in the variety of visitors to the Great Exhibition a sign of the “cosmopolitan … character” of the English nation itself’.12 7 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: The condition and earnings ofthosethatwillwork,cannotwork,andwillnotwork (London:C.Griffin&Co.,1861),vol.1, p. 266. 8 The flâneur is evident in the work of Mayhew, as well as in the writings of Dickens (notably, Sketches by Boz) and other contemporaries. See, for example, Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London: Verso, 1997). Arthur Munby, for example, visiting the International Exhibition of 1862, ‘constructed his own exhibits. He watched the elegant gentlefolk who thought that they were viewers rather than viewed, enjoying the contrast between them and the [machinery] operatives. He even lingered at the end of the day to watch the employees lining up to be paid – another unauthorized exhibit.’ Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 22. 9 John Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 114. See Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 204–52. 10 Marriott, The Other Empire, p. 114. 11 [Eliza Lynn], ‘Passing Faces’, Household Words, 14 April 1855. 12 Henry Cole, ‘Lecture XX. 2nd series. December 1, 1852. On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851’, in Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole, KCB, accounted for in his deeds, speeches and writings (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), vol. 2, pp. 233–4, cited in Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian,

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The language of cultural awareness and diversity was appropriated further still by a rush of popular titles including Watts Phillips’s The Wild Tribes of London (1855). This fascination with cultural difference contributed to the growing taste for exoticism that also coincided with and expanded on the public’s growing fascination with the metaphors, the narratives, and the possibilities for travel to unknown places that was made possible by companies (like Cook’s Tours) that specialized in affordable travel for the newly mobile and leisure-conscious middle classes. The interest in experiencing otherness – to become a ‘cosmopolitan’ – can be seen as early as 1821, when, in his Life in London, Pierce Egan contended that London is a ‘complete cyclopaedia … every square in the metropolis is a sort of map well worthy of exploring’.13 Over time this taste for observation and spectacle extended beyond the Exhibition spaces so that towards the end of the nineteenth century the city of London had itself been thoroughly reconceptualized in terms borrowed from the imperial tropes popularized in the first instance by the Great Exhibition and analyzed in great detail by international visitors. It was from this time and in relation to this event that we can identify the emerging racialization of class discourses within Britain. Indeed, the depiction of domestic difference according to racialized tropes can be seen as developing in close association with the imperial project of international exhibitions and world’s fairs globally throughout the following century. Suspension of Disbelief and the Production of Otherness The Exhibition offered situations whereby the societies and individuals represented were thoroughly contained at the same time as they were available (for voyeurism or purchase). As Jeffrey Auerbach contends, ‘Whatever doubts British men and women may have had about the composition of their own society, they had few such doubts about what differentiated them not only from their closest neighbours, but from the exotic, foreign “other”’.14 India, for and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 208; Louise Purbrick, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 8. See also Elizabeth Bonython and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2003); Louise Purbrick, ‘The South Kensington Museum: The Building of the House of Henry Cole’, in Marcia Pointon (ed.), Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994). 13 Pierce Egan (with Robert and George Cruikshank), Life in London: or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, esq., and his elegant friend Corinthia Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and sprees through the metropolis (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821), cited in Marriott, The Other Empire, p. 103. See also John Marriott (ed.), Unknown London. Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–1845, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000). 14 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 3.

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example – as the ‘jewel’ most desired by the British Crown – was constructed in the exhibitions (especially in 1851 and at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition) as a museum or archive with ‘crafts consigned to the past and their merits unattainable by modern, Western habits of production’.15 Although this spectacle promoted a sense of interpersonal and geographical proximity on one hand, it also succeeded in preserving a strong sense of cultural distinction between nations. This disjuncture meant that the decontextualized status of fetishized objects was preserved, no matter how popular they were. In fact, the more omnipresent and fashionable these commodities were to become, the more ‘Oriental’ and mythical they also became. For example, one visitor to the 1851 Exhibition described cashmere shawls from India as ‘designed for eternity in the unchanging past, copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists’.16 Thus constituting a form of virtual tourism, the displays and depictions of foreign products and technologies combined with visitors and participants from far-flung places, together with the human scale panoramas offered by the exhibitions of the mid- to late nineteenth century, to produce a collective taste for believing in the unfamiliar and unlikely (as unfamiliar and unlikely). Not only did this allow for ‘the parochialism of Londoners, and their reliance on vicarious rather than actual travel’,17 it developed the taste for actual mobility promoted since 1841 by British entrepreneur Thomas Cook. Already popular among the upper classes, the commodity of tourism – whether physical or imagined – combined the increased mobility and technological advances of the new era with Cook’s marketing strategies to make it appear an affordable and even democratic pastime.18 Cook’s promotions were a feature of the 1851 Great Exhibition, and particularly notable were the tours to visit not the exhibits of the East, but the ‘East itself’.19 In the comic novel 1851; or, the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family who came to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’ and to see the Great Exhibition, written in collaboration with the illustrator George Cruikshank, and originally published in eight monthly parts between February and October 1851, Henry Mayhew noted that ‘London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, had been a curious sight even to Londoners’: 15 Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Purbrick (ed.), p. 161. 16 Ibid. 17 Carol A. Breckenridge, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World’s Fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31/2 (1989), pp. 195–216, at p. 197. 18 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 59–61; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 11; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 19 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31/2,(1989), pp. 217–36, at p. 227.

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… New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis …; Mr Catlin had re-opened his Indian exhibition; Mr Wyld had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with the view of cramming into it – ‘yea, the great globe itself!’ The geographical panoramas had rapidly increased, no less than three Jerusalems having been hatched, as it were, by steam – like eggs, by the patent incubator – within the last three weeks. ‘Australia’ and ‘New Zealand,’ like floating islands, had shifted their quarters from Miss Linwood’s Gallery to the Strand, while the cost of immigrating thither for half-an-hour was reduced from sixpence for each country, to ‘three-pence all the way;’ while those who felt indisposed for so long a journey, could make the ‘Grand Tour of Europe’ for one shilling, or take the ‘Overland Route to India’ for the same price, or be set down by the Waterloo omnibus at the entrance to the ‘Dardanelles,’ and see all over ‘Constantinople’ for less than a trip to Gravesend.20

Or, as it was stated in Dickens’ Household Words, ‘Now … we can visit any portion of the globe by taking a cab or an omnibus to Leicester Square’.21 Within the Crystal Palace itself, Mayhew wrote, ‘You might wander where you pleased – to “France” – and see the exquisite tapestry; you might step across to “Austria” – and wonder at the carving of the furniture’.22 Later, of the soon to be opened exhibits at the relocated Crystal Palace, it was noted in Household Words that ‘Greece and Athens have come to Sydenham by railway’. Not only was it possible to ‘wander where you pleased’ geographically, but also back in time through a survey, albeit proscribed, of the history of art: Rub your eyes. Dear me! Dear me! This is not Egypt; but merely a court of the Fairy Palace, representing the progress of Egyptian art … So from Egypt into Nineveh, from Nineveh into Greece, from Greece into Rome, from Rome to the Renaissance, from the Renaissance to the Louis Quatorze. We wander from court to court, each firmly stamping in our mind’s eye the use and progress, and culmination and decadence of every school, losing ourselves in the mazes of antiquity, and finding ourselves in the Crystal Palace again.23

At the Crystal Palace, and at the exhibitions which followed, a belief in the effects of virtual travel was compounded by the visitor’s curiosity which was piqued by aesthetics and otherness, so that a group of native artisans displayed in the Indian Palace at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition was celebrated in The Indian Mirror as ‘a curiously pretty spectacle of oriental

20 Henry Mayhew, 1851; or, the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family who came to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’ and to See the Great Exhibition (London: D. Bogue, 1851), pp. 132–3. See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 455–69. 21 Household Words, 16 August 1851, p. 492. See also Sabine Clemm, ‘“Amidst the heterogeneous masses”: Charles Dickens’s Household Words and the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 27/3 (2005), pp. 207–30. 22 Mayhew, 1851, p. 137. 23 ‘Fairyland in ’Fifty-four’, Household Words, 3 December 1853, p. 315.

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life’. Sentiments of belief were, indeed, widely expressed in relation to the exhibitions’ representation of aesthetic and industrial treasures, which were organized for contemplation and awe and for the ‘documentation’ of ethnic otherness depicted for the purposes of ‘scientific’ observation and instructional purposes. Offering a conceptual link between the premodern (princely) museums and the cabinets of curiosities of the sixteenth century with the systematic and logic-driven approach to museum-making, the suspension of disbelief contributed to the exhibitions’ successful institutionalization of entertainment (and its association with education). Indeed, this was commented on by William Whewell in his lecture ‘The Results of the Exhibition’, delivered after the Exhibition had closed, in which he compared the Exhibition to such a cabinet, while also congratulating the organizers for having provided a ‘scientific moral’ in the way they had classified and ordered the objects on display.25 Moreover, as Peter Hoffenberg notes with regard to later colonial exhibitions and displays, ‘[t]he historicist appropriation of the mythical Eastern bazaar was part of that seemingly common nineteenth-century manoeuvre by which the new was made popular by appealing to the old, even if the latter was a product of the imagination’.26 This suspension of disbelief led to a taste for otherness, so that the images of otherness became increasingly familiar due to mass production and popularity, thus constituting a recognized – and paradoxically ‘authentic’ – code of otherness. Creating stereotypical and reductive scenarios of colonial cultures, new technologies of representation such as panoramas, and the new focus on looking, facilitated by displaying objects in glass display cases shown to effect by electric light, was directed to show the ‘great diversity’ of Her Majesty’s subjects.27 However, in constructing simulated displays of different cultures, as easily apprehendable and consumable syntagms of symbolic otherness, the stereotype came to acquire an authenticity on the basis that it is subject to the ongoing reproduction repetition enabled by new technologies, new mobilities, and the fictions peddled by new symbolic exchanges. A Palatable Reformism: The Exhibition as ‘sublime musayum’ The relationship between imperialism, trade, education and citizenship (and consumption) aimed to demonstrate to audiences that culture was constructed – a skill to be learned and admired. Programmes dedicated to the entwined pleasures of entertainment and education also demonstrated that a national citizenry could be constituted and protected according to the acculturation and aggregation of all classes. While reformism was one of the day’s most 24 Saloni Mathur, ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886’, Cultural Anthropology, 15/4 (2000), pp. 492–524, at p. 498. 25 Hoffenberg, p. 204. 26 Ibid., p. 230. 27 Frank Cundall, Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886), p. 5, cited in Mathur, p. 506.

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28

popular projects, it was on this basis that Thackeray’s Mr Malony parodies the Exhibition when he describes his experience of visiting the ‘sublime musayum’ of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851: Amazed I pass From glass to glass, Deloighted I survey ’em; Fresh wondthers grows Before me nose In this sublime Musayum. Look, here’s a fan From far Japan, A sabre from Damasco; There’s shawls ye get From far Thibet, And cotton prints from Glasgow.29

And yet, almost concurrent with this, Thomas Greenwood suggested that public museums at this time were themselves becoming increasingly exhibitionlike. In his 1888 survey, Museums and Art Galleries, Greenwood accounted for the rapid development of museum culture that had occurred throughout England in the mid-nineteenth century. He believed the increasing popularity of museums resulted from cooperation between civic effort and philanthropy, and argued that these new exhibitionary environments – many of which expanded further upon the form and function of the international exhibitions, and sought to corroborate with rather than compete against them – inspired a ‘craving’ for knowledge in the working classes and encouraged ‘the duties and privileges of citizenship’ and pride in the nation.30 Successfully combining the symbols and practices of good citizenship with practices of consumption, new technologies and the techniques of mass production impacted on local economies as well as transnational mobility. New modes of production and commodification were made possible, and by converting vast numbers of farm labourers principally to factory work, a new and more economically secure class of consumers emerged. Often having only recently migrated to the cities and industrial areas from agrarian communities, this new (sub-) class offered an exemplary audience for programmes of reform and betterment. It was also believed that these groups must be educated in order to achieve the unified, singular and successful image of national cooperation and identity that was 28 Notable examples include Henry Cole, Dickens, Mayhew, Arnold Thackeray, and later Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley and others. 29 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Mr Malony’s Account of the Crystal Palace’, Punch, 20 (26 August 1851), p. 171. 30 Thomas Greenwood, Museums and Art Galleries (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1888), cited in Andrew McClellan, ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’, in idem (ed.), Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), p. 11.

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valued as a way to avoid the class revolt still occurring in parts of France and across Europe. These values are reflected by Matthew Arnold, writing in 1869, who argued that educational institutions should take the place of organized religion for the newly urbanized society.31 Similarly, John Ruskin ‘advocated the role of museums in educating and controlling “the labouring multitude” by offering an “example of perfect order and perfect elegance”’.32 In addition to this trend for rational recreations, new technologies and the widespread zeal for reformism also enhanced the enlargement of possibilities for visualization (cinema, street lighting, new vistas offered by railway travel), and the construction of unified symbols of nationality that were defined in opposition to highly visible stereotypes of cultural and racial otherness. The principle of education by pleasure gained particular popularity at this time.33 It is in this spirit that the Illustrated London News published the following account of the Great Exhibition: Hither to all classes seem to have determined upon studying in it its manifold aspects of usefulness, and to have ceased to regard it as a mere show, got up for their amusement. They have taken this view not simply because the sovereign was among the first to set the admirable example, and because the wealthy and titled of the land simultaneously followed it, but because they rightly appreciated its character and intention. Of course, amid such large masses of people, there must be many thousands disqualified by taste and temperament from taking the full advantage of the unrivalled opportunity afforded them, and who seek for nothing but amusement amid the beauties of art and the wonders of mechanism; but taking the visitors as a body, and without distinction of class or price, it is quite evident that the majority turn their inspection to practical and educational account. Nothing can be more satisfactory than this.34

In 1850, at Prince Albert’s suggestion, a Central Working Classes Committee (CWCC) had been established to promote the interests of the working classes at the Exhibition. Henry Cole was secretary to the committee that included Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Dickens, Arnold Thackeray, Dr Southward Smith, Robert Chambers, John Forster (editor of the Daily News), several clergymen (including Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, or ‘S.G.O.’, the controversial letterwriter to The Times), four Members of Parliament, and three former Chartists. 31 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings, ed. Samuel Lipton (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 32 McClellan, ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’, p. 8. See also Catherine Morley, John Ruskin: Late Work, 1870–1890. The Museum and Guild of St. George: An Educational Experiment (New York: Garland, 1984). 33 Robert Rydell, ‘The Literature of International Expositions’, in The Books of the Fairs: Materials about World’s Fairs, 1834–1916, in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1992); Annie E. Coombes, ‘Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 34 Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 476.

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However, when the Royal Commission refused to sanction the work of the committee, largely on account of its radical composition, the CWCC was forced to dissolve itself after little more than a month in existence. Dickens, who proposed the dissolution, ‘argued that without official recognition, the CWCC would be unable either to render efficiently the services it sought to perform or to command the confidence of the working classes’.35 Equality, ‘Shilling Days’, Cultural Capital, and the Manufacture of Nation According to their early modes of organization and through their articulation of the premises and trends of cultural modernity and social (capitalist) modernization, the international exhibitions of the nineteenth century functioned as rigorous ideological institutions. Framed according to a clearly stated moral agenda, their propensity to function as a visible actor within commodity culture made them valuable tools for appropriation by the state. Andrew McClellan explains that during the Victorian era and beyond, ‘the museum [and exhibition] public was commonly represented as an idealised projection of what liberal politicians and social critics hoped it would become’.36 In accord with this and the reformist spirit of the day, they preached education to the working classes and attempted to facilitate learning by offering entry to the Great Exhibition for a shilling on certain days (although the discount rates were not offered on Saturday afternoons, which was the most popular time for bourgeois visitors but possibly the only time many workers could attend).37 Motivated by social unification, these measures aimed to educate ‘the layman who enjoyed art’. However, they also aimed to produce a selfaware visitor who would ‘behave as a competent consumer who uses art and relates aesthetic experiences to his own life problems’.38 ‘The First Shilling Day at the Exhibition’ was described in the Morning Chronicle, and reprinted in the Illustrated London Times as follows: … The first glance revealed the change from the last day of last week. The glitter, the elegance, the luxe was gone. … … it was worthwhile to study the people attentively. They were far less welldressed – far less elegant than the previous crowds; but it was only here and there that a man or woman palpably belonged to the working classes. Sunday clothes had been at all events donned … … we passed the latter part of the day in doing little else than studying the crowds by whom we were surrounded. …39

35 Auerbach, p. 130. 36 McClellan, ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’, p. 7. 37 ‘The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace’, Punch, 20 (1851), p. 240. 38 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger in association with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 12. 39 Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 501.

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Another commentator described the difference between the five shilling days and the one shilling days as ‘[o]n one day, society – on the other, the world’.40 Rather than replacing the predilection for distinction and differentiation that was emerging as a component of capitalism, mass production and the new middle class worked to increase the symbolic power of the commodity (primarily due to the aspirational sensibility associated with the condition of being middle class). Instead of resulting in the eradication of class difference, the new middle class was even more eager for the self-improvement and education that would add further value to the new leisure-time activity of conspicuous consumption: they desired the tools that would enable differentiation from the lower working classes. The intention to maintain clear markers of class differentiation is evident in the Illustrated London News story quoted above, which takes care to clarify issues of class: ‘We have said that there seemed to be comparatively few artisans present. The middle classes, and those between the middle class and the working classes tradesfolk, and the great nondescript order of people who are seen on all public occasions in England, who are difficult to place socially, but who never miss a Derby, who throng the back benches of the courts of law, who always turn up at a boat-match or a house on fire’ continued to make up the majority of attendees.41 Not only did the acquisition of cultural capital provide enhanced personal status, the ability to participate with agency (gained by the ability to make purchases) gave people the opportunity to feel liberated momentarily from their everyday lives. Discussing a trade fair held in Paris in 1798 as a forerunner of the expositions universelles, Walter Benjamin described such events as having proceeded ‘from the wish to entertain the working classes … becom[ing] for them a symbol of emancipation’.42 In promoting a class-based nationalism and imperialist ideology, claims were made that the exhibitions offered a democratic space for the interaction of all.43 Arnold idealistically identified culture and art as a means of unification rather than the ‘engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it’, as in the past.44 This egalitarian vision was also represented by French and American exhibitions – which promoted the liberty afforded by republicanism and the equality of all men in the post-revolutionary world. Similarly promising social progress for the masses, the promotion of exhibition fervour in England leading up to the opening of the Great Exhibition may have been linked to the desire to distract public attention from urgent political issues, including the political significance 40 Illustrated London News, 19 July 1851, pp. 100–102. 41 Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 501. 42 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. P. Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London: New Left, 1978), p. 152. 43 Arnold, pp. 106–8. See also Bonython and Burton. 44 Arnold, pp. 29–30.

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of the Chartist demonstration of 10 April 1848 (which also took place in Hyde Park), and the extent of its suppression by the state.45 Indeed, in his novel 1851 (which, while a work of fiction, utilizes aspects of journalism), Mayhew argued that the Great Exhibition could not fail to fill working men with pride and ‘inspire them with a sense of their position in the State, and to increase their self respect in the same ratio as it must tend to increase the respect of all others for their vocation’.46 Perhaps this concern for social stability explained the anxiety expressed in the Illustrated London News that ‘the influx’ of the working classes to the Crystal Palace on the first shilling day was ‘far less than expected’.47 Combined with an anxiety that was related to revolutionary activities occurring in Europe, this image of equality also marks a shift away from the direct management of class confrontation by means of force (that had occurred in the past) towards the governmental implementation of culture as a tool used for the purposes of order (and control by means of civilization). However, while the exhibitions were viewed increasingly as vehicles for integrating and ordering the ‘masses’ peaceably through large-scale entertainment, it is also notable that an extra policeman stood guard at the much-coveted ‘Koh-i-Noor’ diamond on the Shilling Days. Conversely, the Illustrated London News also registered expressions of surprise that shilling day visitors were so well behaved.48 Similarly, in 1851, Mayhew recounted that: For many days before the ‘shilling people’ were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? will they destroy the things? will they want to cut their initials, or scratch their names on the panes of the glass lighthouse? But they have surpassed in decorum the hopes of their well-wishers. The fact is, the Great Exhibition is to them more of a school than a show … If we really desire the improvement of our social state, (and surely we are far from perfection yet,) we must address ourselves to the elevation of the people; and it is because the Great Exhibition is fitted to become a special instrument towards this end, that it forms one of the most remarkable and hopeful characteristics of our time.49

At the end of June 1851, it was reported in the Illustrated London News that ‘… the turn of those who are too poor to pay for such an amusement has come also’ and that ‘the doors of the Crystal Palace have been opened to many thousands of industrious, grateful, well-behaved, and admiring people, without cost to themselves’ – the cost of admission instead being met by 45 See Purbrick’s introduction to The Great Exhibition of 1851 (pp. 4–5) for a discussion of the differences between using 1848 and 1851 as signposts in British history. Purbrick cites John Saville, who, in his book 1848, ‘argues that 1851 contributed a state of amnesia about the political significance of Chartism and the extent of its state suppression.’ She suggests that histories that use 1851 to ‘summarise the mid-nineteenth century cannot help but continue to diminish the significance of 1848’. 46 Mayhew, 1851, p. 132. 47 Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 501. 48 Ibid. 49 Mayhew, 1851, pp. 161–2.

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philanthropic individuals. ‘Clergymen and landed proprietors in remote rural districts have organised plans by which whole troops of agricultural labourers, with their wives and children, have been enabled to visit London’, while some domestic servants and ‘workers and employees were given holidays to visit and in numerous instances transport and admission paid’.50 There were also publicized visits by children from the London Orphan Asylum (113 girls and 262 boys), and assisted emigrants on the eve of departure to one or other of the colonies.51 According to an article published in the Illustrated Exhibitor, ‘It is not a small excitement … which so stirs the heart of private benevolence throughout the kingdom that even our charity schools, and the inmates of our workhouses, are largely represented at this Jubilee of Industry.’52 The promise of a liberal hegemonic egalitarianism was important for English exhibitions that took place prior to the Education Act of 1870, for the additional reason that it was not until then that locally controlled elementary schools were established through new legislation. Summarizing the events of May 1851 in Household Words, Dickens juxtaposes the opening of the Great Exhibition with ‘one of the few [subjects] which even above the dust and din from Hyde Park has been able to make itself visible and audible in the House of Commons’ – that is, William Johnson Fox’s renewed attempt, and failure, ‘to obtain the consent of that house to a plan for promoting the education of the people by the establishment of free schools for secular instruction’.53 Moreover, in 1851, working men in England had yet to be awarded the vote. In addition to advocating the education of the working classes, it is also significant that Arnold saw the spread of culture as a way to redress the ‘shallow materialism of the expanding middle classes’.54 Indicating a possible paradox in his own argument, while Arnold perceived the public functions for culture as rigorously stabilizing, he also saw in it the potential for subversion, the disruption of conservative middle-class comfortability and materialism; a stance that Robert Young has described as anti-reifying and anti-ideological.55 Furthermore, the new images of clearly framed ‘cultural’ products – be they anthropological or artistic – offered British audiences precisely what, according to Arnold, they had previously lacked. While Young asserts that Arnold equivocates culture with nationalism and national identity at a fundamental level, he also notes that the connection between culture and ‘Englishness is not at all obvious – for the whole argument of Culture and Anarchy is that culture in England is lacking. Culture is characteristically defined for Arnold in strictly exotic terms’.56

50 Illustrated London News, 28 June 1851, pp. 606–7. 51 Illustrated London News, 3 May 1851, pp. 378–9 and 21 June 1851, p. 584. 52 Illustrated Exhibitor, 1 November 1851, p. 394. 53 ‘The Household Narrative of Current Events’, supplement to Household Words, 27 April to 28 May 1851, p. 97. 54 McClellan, ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’, p. 12. 55 Robert. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 57, 58, 82–9. 56 Ibid., p. 57.

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Yet, this differentiation of otherness may be more domestic in focus than Young suggests, and might be directed towards consolidating the symbolic function of ‘nation’, even if it was at the expense of providing the English with a culture. Rather than aiming to endear a spirit of goodwill among nations – which Paul Greenhalgh asserts that it did not57 – and in accord with Arnold’s aims to educate the English, the primary intent may have been to produce a sense of national unity among members of all classes. Despite such sentiments, not all people (or rather the activities that defined them) were welcomed within the Crystal Palace. Yet the effect of the Exhibition extended beyond its walls to those excluded, like the seller of illustrated postcards described by Mayhew, from the building and its grounds. In London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew locates the subjects of his study outside the Exhibition but within its sphere of influence. Likewise in the fictionalized account, 1851, he describes ‘along the edge of the footpath’ leading to the Crystal Palace, ‘hawkers, shouting out the attractions of their wares – some had trays filled with bright silvery-looking medals of the Exhibition – others, pictures of it printed in gold on “gelatine cards”’.58 ‘Nor,’ Mayhew states, when describing the morning of the Exhibition’s opening in 1851, ‘were the beggars absent from the scene, for in every direction along which the great mass of people came pouring, there were the blind and the crippled, reaping their holiday harvest’.59 Similarly, having described for an audience of children the wonders and wealth of London, the writer of The World’s Fair: or Children’s Prize Book of the Great Exhibition of 1851 cautions the reader: ‘However, you must not think, from all this, there are no poor people in London; for, unfortunately, there are thousands’.60 While Mayhew describes the interior of the Crystal Palace and its exhibits (generally as the products of labour rather than as commodities) for the audience of 1851, it is telling that his heroes, despite their best intentions, never reach the Exhibition itself, being constantly hampered in their efforts by the Exhibition’s effect on London – from the large numbers of other ‘sight-seers of the world’ and the unavailability of both transport and accommodation to the deceptions of unscrupulous street sellers, foreigners and locals alike. At the end of August 1851, four months after the Exhibition had opened, a decline in attendance was noted, due – it was speculated – to the harvests, leading to a call for the introduction of six-pence days for ‘those engaged in that silent under-current of industry, whose labours are in the lowly and dark stations of society, and whose heads are only lifted

57 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 18. 58 Mayhew, 1851, p. 133. 59 Ibid., p. 128. 60 The World’s Fair: or Children’s Prize Book of the Great Exhibition of 1851, describing the beautiful inventions and manufactures exhibited therein, with pretty stories about the people who have made and sent them and how they live when at home (London: Thomas Dean & Son, [1851]), p. 80.

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up at such great holidays as Easter and Whitsuntide. At other times all is a blank. Now these comprise an immense portion of the population of this metropolis, to whom a shilling is a serious object’.61 While much has been made of working-class interest in the Great Exhibition, and for exhibitions generally, as expressed in radical periodicals such as Reynold’s Newspaper or the Chartist Northern Star, there were those who were critical of the undertaking from the start. Edward Reynolds, for example (writing as ‘Gracchus’ in Reynold’s Newspaper), ‘berated the Exhibition as a “gigantic folly” designed to distract people from the real political issues of the day’. In a later piece, he ‘argued that the Great Exhibition would not have been possible without the working class but that the event had in effect been largely appropriated by the aristocracy and the capitalist class’. A letter published in the Northern Star after the Exhibition had finished argued that the labouring classes had been poorly represented, with only about one million of the calculated six million visitors being ‘from the “artisan and dangerous orders” and that this relatively modest number proved “as much the inability as the unwillingness of the many to visit it, notwithstanding the charge was but a shilling”’.62 On 10 May 1851, at a meeting of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, the Earl of Carlisle ‘alluded to the considerations naturally suggested by the contemplation of the Great Exhibition. They had (he said) close to where they sat, that remarkable building which was in itself a shrine of labour; but while they gazed on the long array of its radiant offerings, or the results of its harmonious combinations, let them not refrain from tracing them back in thought to the crowded workshops, to the damp cellars, and to the stifling garrets in which so much of that collected mass of ingenuity and splendour had been elaborated.’63 Indeed, despite the widespread claim that the Exhibition celebrated the ‘Dignity of Labour’,64 and while the modern machines of manufacture were displayed alongside their products, the emphasis of display remained on consumption rather than production. As Lara Kriegel has observed, ‘[a]lthough the Exhibition billed itself as a celebration of industry, its classificatory system rendered labourers themselves virtually invisible. The division of objects into Playfair’s categories of Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufactures and Fine Arts offered no self-evident place for displaying labour’.65 One exception to this practice could be found in the collection of miniature ‘Ethnographic Models’ of Indian labourers displayed 61 Illustrated London News, 30 August 1851, p. 270. 62 Peter Gurney, ‘An Appropriated Space: The Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the Working Class’, in Purbrick (ed.), pp. 118–22. Gurney cites Reynold’s Newspaper, 9 March 1851, p. 7 and 24 August 1851, p. 7; and Northern Star, 18 October 1851, p. 1. 63 ‘The Household Narrative of Current Events’, supplement to Household Words, 27 April to 28 May 1851, p. 115. 64 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, delivered his address ‘On the Dignity of Labour’ at the first meeting of the Westminster local committee in 1850, and other promoters and commentators quickly took up the phrase (Auerbach, pp. 129–30). 65 Kriegel, p. 164.

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in the Indian Court that pre-dated the living ethnographic villages of colonized peoples that featured at later exhibitions. In offering a contrast to the celebration of disciplined and mechanical English labour (while at the same time harking back to a seemingly less complex, pre-industrial past), the collection of more than 150 models ‘provided a spiritual and material foil to Britain’s industrial modernity’.66 City as Spectacle: New Economies of Looking In the decades following the Great Exhibition, and particularly in the 1880s, the full impact of the discourses of otherness and racialization took hold both in relation to domestic British tastes and expanding practices of international trade, travel and migration. Just as the currency of national symbolism was recognized by the British Empire, nationalism was asserted by other countries and the potential of rhetoric to produce a national symbolism or imaginary can be recognized in the accounts of travellers from India and other colonial centres such as Egypt to international exhibitions held in Britain and France.67 In these instances, such language encouraged the consolidation of singular cohesive forms of symbolism for non-English visitors to the exhibitions. At a time when India, for example, ‘was considered by most if not all Britons to be a set of centripetal communities and factions incapable of ever consolidating into a national whole (and hence unworthy of the gift of self-government)’, Antoinette Burton explains that the ‘“Indian” eye offered a persuasive challenge’ by suggesting that the city could be objectified by a ‘centrifugal Indian “national” gaze’.68 While national aggregation was due in part to the expanding English middle class, the accounts of travellers from India and elsewhere suggest that it may have been connected more directly to the simultaneous imperial expansion of the nation state, and the way that racial and cultural difference was positioned as other to the English and European visitors to the exhibitions and metropolitan centres. Expanding upon Young’s claim that the exhibitions may have provided English audiences with culture as something previously lacking in their self- and national imaginary, we can also note that in the Great Exhibition ‘empire’ was represented as host. Comparisons were made between the batches of products presented by foreign nations, however, as host of the Exhibition Britain encompassed all these nations on show (even if they were not part of the empire) and was to be congratulated for the good taste associated with ‘collecting’ together the arts and industry of the world.69 66 Ibid., pp. 164–5. 67 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). 68 Antoinette Burton, ‘Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-deSiècle London’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), pp. 127–46, at p. 143. 69 Victoria and Albert Museum, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Commemorative Album (London: HMSO, 1950).

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The taste for new commodities and the economies of looking, and the voyeurism attending these, went both ways. As the travelogues published by Indian writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century show, the English also became subject to the travellers’ gaze. Consistent with the broader desire for status and personal acumen based on taste and distinction, their writings demonstrate class as a continuing and equally important factor in the constitution of authority in relation to the observing eye/I whatever the nationality of the observer. For example, similar hierarchies were selfconsciously reproduced by the Indian traveller-authors who were themselves often wealthy and cosmopolitan in outlook. As is pointed out in the introduction to the 1889 travelogue of T. N. Mukharji, an English-educated, upper-class Bengali Brahmin, entitled A Visit to Europe, through such publications ‘the European will learn to see himself as others see him’.70 Contending that the Indian travellers to London embodied the agency associated with the ‘properly bourgeois, gentlemanly subject’, Burton argues that it was the advantage of class that allowed them to enact self-governance in relation to the new metropolis.71 London not only provided a host to the exhibitions and their visitors, but it offered a forum for the expansion of programmes of reform and spectacle beyond the exhibitions’ boundaries. The whole city was thus bound up in mythical discourse that contributed fundamentally to the way that visitors were able to suspend their disbelief – which may have contributed to statements by Indian visitors about how authentic certain aspects of the 1886 Exhibition were.72 Building on the earlier work by Dickens and Mayhew, the city came to exist as a site of spectacle and consumption, and offered visitors the means to acquire personal status and cultural capital. Although the colonial exhibitions promoted dominant discourses through which the idea and experience of otherness was constituted, the historical subjects of ethnological display, and those travellers from colonial or remote countries who visited the exhibitions, can also be seen as having refused the terms of their representation. Critical of the racism demonstrated by visitors to the 1886 Exhibition, Mukharji comments, ‘would they discuss us so freely … if they knew that we understood their language?’73 Moreover, the new technologies of modernity, including the mass production of glass panels and the use of gas lighting, facilitated the process of looking anew – indeed, few Indian travellers did not remark on the poverty and relative lack of progress they found in London. Terrible poverty, prostitutes, and normal ‘domestic’ scenes all were described as spectacles, and one writer noted that ‘Old King Gas’ was only slowly being replaced by ‘the Imperial brilliance of the electric light’.74 70 T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman, 1889), cited in Burton, p. 143. 71 Burton, p. 141. 72 Mathur, p. 498. 73 Mukharji, p. 101, cited in Mathur, p. 509. 74 T. B. Pandian, England to an Indian Eye; or, English Pictures from an Indian Camera (London: E. Stock, 1897), p. 21, cited in Burton, p. 134.

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While international visitors were thus able to achieve a degree of agency through participating in an exchange of gazes and the active framing of the city, discourses of race and imperialism maintained a contemporary authority, so that over time they became increasingly used for the attribution and description of class difference. By the 1880s, for example, the East End was increasingly understood by middle- and upper-class Londoners as a different world.75 Referred to as ‘darkest England’, its inhabitants were spoken of as a separate ‘race’.76 Saloni Mathur explains that ‘London of the 1880s was thus profoundly mapped in imperial terms: whereas the West End symbolised the triumph of empire, the East End was its “foreign, dark, and forbidding” other. In fact, the language of colonial expansion and exploration became the terms in which urban social divisions were conceived’.77 As Seth Koven argues in his work on slumming, ‘the metropolitan slums and distant outposts of empire were linked in the British imperial imagination as places of freedom and danger, missionary altruism and sexual opportunity’.78 Moreover, according to Marriott, the racialization of the poor, ‘which began in mid century and intensified during the 1860s and 1880s was in terms of its chronology, narrative and rhetoric so similar to constructions of colonial others that they can be seen as shared and mutually reinforcing responses to deep anxieties about the future of the imperial race’.79 Anxiety over this situation may explain why imperialism continued to trade so consistently in the persistently reproduced symbolic economy of persuasive – if ersatz – images. Elaborating on this, Ann Laura Stoler argues that colonialism ‘was not only about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies, but the making of them’;80 a point that we see clearly in relation to the rapidly spreading fashion throughout England and France for Indian fabrics and crafted items. Taken alongside Arnold’s provocations that England would benefit from the culture of the non-European, these claims contribute to the argument that colonization (or the display of colonization in the exhibitions) contributed indelibly to the way in which the European bourgeoisie developed. However, as Stoler also explains, this issue of contingency or relationality is itself far from simplistic. Among other urgent questions, she argues that we should ask whether the language of class has been ‘itself racialised in such 75 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Night: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 76 Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among the Urban Poor’, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 77 Mathur, p. 500. 78 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 21. 79 Marriott, The Other Empire, p. 42. 80 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 99.

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a way that to subscribe to bourgeois respectability entailed dispositions and sentiments coded by race?’ And if, she continues, this relationship between the affirmation of bourgeois hegemony and colonial practices was contingent, ‘should we assume that the latter was necessary to the former’s “cultivation” or merely supportive of it?’81 Conclusion: Exploring the World within the City within One Day One consequence associated with the changing spectacles – and publicity forms – of empire (and the correlative stereotypes of otherness) was the presentation of the world as reproducible, consumable, and as fundamentally illustrative. The exhibitions (aided by Cook’s Tours’ advertising campaigns) consistently claimed that visitors could ‘explore the world in a day’, and so aimed to contain the world to a single sight/site. Moreover, by bringing the produce of the world (more or less) to a single shared location, visitors could also purvey the realm of empire within a single gaze. In presenting an image of the world as a picture, the aim was to make as real as possible for visitors the experience of travel to the geographically remote places that were represented. Initiating interconnections between reality and representation (where representation appears more believable than the reality offered by the city outside – which then comes in turn to be itself modelled on the images within the exhibitions), the international exhibitions offer an exacting case study for the analysis of Said’s Orientalism.82 The edifices produced for the exhibitions – and particularly the Crystal Palace, which offered a panoptical approach to control83 – portray an architectural model of modern politics in which vision, knowledge and power depend on location and positionality. In the context of the Great Exhibition, not only did the ‘world’ appear encapsulated within the city, but it offered and legitimated a diversity of experience and new ways of talking about class that contributed to the reconfiguration of London and its social spaces in explicitly exotic and racialized terms. As demonstrated by the Arnoldian desire to inculcate the English working classes with culture (to aggregate them into a unified national polity), and by evidence recorded in the accounts of T. N. Mukharji and others of the contested dialogical ground and shifting power relationships between the English and the Indians, colonialism could not be considered a secure bourgeois project in the nineteenth century.

81 Ibid., pp. 100–101. 82 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1991 [1978]). 83 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 65.

Chapter 3

Defining Nation: Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851* Louise Purbrick

An issue of the Illustrated Exhibitor devoted to ‘Ireland’s Contributions to the World’s Fair’ presented an account of an ancient struggle against Roman oppression. ‘We all know the old story – every child is familiar with it’, began the Illustrated Exhibitor, before it went on to remind its readers of the story’s most significant details. Caractacus was a ‘British General’: … famed as the bravest among his compeers, [he] yearned to relieve his oppressed country from the iron grasp of her invaders … for nine years, he continued to oppose and annoy the Romans … at last, he was taken at the conclusion of a well fought but disastrous battle, and brought a prisoner into the presence of his imperial conqueror … he was led in chains through the streets of the thrice glorious city … in the very depth of his shame and indignation, he turned his eyes upon the splendours that surrounded him and exclaimed:– ‘Alas! is it possible that a people possessed of such magnificence at home can envy me a humble cottage in Britain!’1

Caractacus was set free. A sculpture depicting the moment of his release was exhibited in 1851 by Constantine Panormo. An engraving of the work, titled Caractacus Unbound, was reproduced in the Illustrated Exhibitor (Figure 3.1) 2 * A Visiting Fellowship at Yale Center for British Art enabled Louise Purbrick to carry out research on Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and she would like to thank the Center for its generous support and the staff for their help. 1 ‘Ireland’s Contributions to the World’s Fair, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851), pp. 150–51. 2 For bibliographic information on Constantine Panormo, see W. G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, L–Z, vol. 2 (Dublin and London: Mausel and Company, 1913), pp. 215–17. Strickland notes that Panormo was appointed Master of the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Modelling in 1837 (p. 216). Ambrose Poynter’s 1850 report on the ‘Dublin School’ (by this time a regional school in the South Kensington system) noted that he ‘conducts his class with a degree of ability and attention leaving nothing to be desired’ (British Parliamentary Papers, ‘Reports and Documents relative to the Head and Provincial Schools of Design’, Reports and Papers relating to the Head and Branch Schools of Design together with the First Report of the Department of Practical Art, 1850–3, Industrial Revolution, Design, IV [Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971], p. 47). See also references to Panormo in J. White, ‘Art: Painting and Sculpture’, in J. Meenan and D. Clarke (eds), The Royal Dublin Society 1731–1981 (Dublin: Gill

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The image shows the colonized Briton above his conqueror: a Roman soldier is depicted beneath him undoing his chains. Caractacus is visibly and thus politically superior. Classical conventions, which denote the civilized subject, have been employed to represent the ‘British General’. His partially draped body stands tall; his legs are apart, asymetrical but balanced, demonstrating composure. His exposed chest and lower legs show muscles delineated without excessive detail and his head is slightly turned, held high but not upward, eyes looking into the distance. These smooth classical shapes are disrupted by some indications of uneven textures. Caractacus is bearded and one of his drapes is fur; these uncivilized signs, indications of brutishness, serve to heighten the dramatic revelation of the sculpture. Caractacus is recognized within the work by the Roman who released him and then by visitors to the Exhibition or readers of the Illustrated Exhibitor as possessing a rough dignity, the virtue of the wrongly oppressed. According to the Illustrated Exhibitor, Constantine Panormo’s piece was ‘noble in design.’3 Leon Litvak has suggested that Panormo’s Caractacus is an example of ‘colonial mimicry’, that is, a work that adopts a colonial form but does not reproduce, or at least does not straightforwardly reproduce, colonial meanings.4 Caractacus was a Celtic ruler turned insurgent when his lands in south-east England were occupied by Roman forces in CE 435 and became, from the mideighteenth century, a recurrent figure of antiquarian literature and historicist art, deployed as the personification of a tradition of resistance to foreign subjugation and the spirit of national independence.6 In his study The Image of Antiquity: and Macmillan, 1981), p. 237, and J. Turpin, A School of Art in Dublin since the Eighteenth Century: A History of the National College of Art and Design (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), pp. 98, 108–9, 117, 125, 147–8, 153. There are discrepancies in how his ‘Caractacus’ was described and named. According to the Illustrated Exhibitor it was plaster, but it is listed as a clay model in The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, vol. 2 (London: William Clowes and Spicer Brothers, 1851). The entry in the Official Catalogue reads: ‘Clay model, an original design, taken from the liberation of Caractacus – history of England – “Why envy me a humble cottage in Britain, whilst you have such vast magnificence at home?”’ (p. 850). The Illustrated Exhibitor calls it ‘Caractacus Unbound’, whereas it is also referred to as the ‘Liberation of Caractacus’: see P. Murphy, ‘British Sculpture at the early Universal Exhibitions: Ireland sustaining Britain’, The Sculpture Journal, 3 (1999), p. 72. 3 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 150. 4 Leon Litvak, ‘Exhibiting Ireland, 1851–3: Colonial Mimicry in London, Cork and Dublin’, in Litvak and Glenn Hooper (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 32. His notion of ‘colonial mimicry’ is drawn from Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92. 5 Litvak, p. 28, and S. Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 232, n. 20. Smiles identifies ‘Caratacus’ as the correct spelling of Caractacus here. 6 In the Image of Antiquity (1994), Sam Smiles compares Caractacus with Boadicea and argues they were national figures of a similar order (pp. 17, 45, 73, 137). See also M. Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1987), pp. 49–51.

Defining Nation: Ireland at the Great Exhibition of 1851

3.1

‘Caractacus Unbound’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

49

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Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (1994), Sam Smiles traces how Caractacus could, in different contexts, appear as a Celtic or a British hero or as both,7 and observes how the adoption of an ancient Celtic insurgent as the embodiment of nineteenth-century British national identity was an awkward act of appropriation at a time when Celtic was becoming fixed as a residual or primitive category in a panoply of imperialist discourses, an inferior ‘race’ associated with rural peripheries of Wales, Scotland, and especially Ireland.8 Thus the success of Caractacus as British hero became dependent upon some visual and historical ambiguity, if not abstraction.9 The transformation of an historical figure into an allegory of nation is fairly routinely enacted through the conventions of classical sculpture, a de-historicizing practice that smoothes over specific details in order to make a figurative subject work at a symbolic level. The classicism of Constantine Panormo’s sculpture ensures that Caractacus cannot be pinned down to a particular or real historical moment. The work was ‘placed’, according to the Illustrated Exhibitor, ‘just at the entrance to the Irish Court’ (Figure 3.2). The intention of those who sent Caractacus Unbound to the Great Exhibition, if not that of Panormo, a Dublin-based Italian sculptor, might have been to offer the work as a gesture of unity between Ireland and Britain.10 A shared Celtic heritage was exemplified by Caractacus Unbound, and an historical justification of the 1800 Act of Union could also be implied. But such an interpretation of Caractacus in the Crystal Palace is just one of several possible readings. Rather than a gesture of unity, Panormo’s work could be considered an act of homage. It was not, of course, unusual for Irish sculptors, working in the classical tradition, to produce celebratory works of British subjects.11 Panormo’s Caractacus could 7 Smiles, pp. 40, 137–9. 8 Ibid., p. 149; L. Curtis, Nothing but the Same Old Story (London: Information on Ireland, 1984); L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971), pp. 29–57; L. Gibbons, ‘A Race against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’, in C. Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 207–23; J. Nadel-Klein, ‘Occidentalism as a Cottage Industry: Representing the Autochthonous “Other” in British and Irish Rural Studies’, in J. G. Carrier, Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 109–34. 9 Smiles, p. 151. 10 Reading intention through the selection processes is not a straightforward task. As in Britain, local committees in Ireland chose objects to be sent to the Great Exhibition. There were committees in Belfast, Dublin and Cork; see A. C. Davies, ‘The First Irish Industrial Exhibition Cork, 1852’, Irish Economic and Social History, 2 (1975), p. 47, n. 3. James Macadam Jr, J. Bristow and James Stirling were the principal officers of the Belfast committee; C. G. Feath, J. Skea and J. Lambkin were their counterparts in Cork; Dr J. Lentaigne, Dr R. Harrison, L. E. Foot, R. Atkinson and W. Fry sat on the Dublin committee (The Official Catalogue, Supplementary Volume, pp. 182–5). Panormo’s Caractacus was sent by the Dublin committee and was a replacement for John Hogan’s Hibernia; see Litvak, p. 27. 11 John Foley is perhaps the most well-known artist of this kind. See B. Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1982); );

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‘Entrance to the Irish Court. – Western Main Avenue, South Side’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

B. Read, ‘The Sculpture’ in C. Brooks (ed.) The Albert Memorial (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 161-206. Paula Murphy provides a thoughtful review of the wide contribution of Irish sculptors at mid-nineteenth century Great Exhibitions: P. Murphy, ‘British sculpture’, The Sculpture Journal: 64-73 (see note 2 above)., ‘The Sculpture’, in C. Brooks (ed.), The Albert Memorial (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 161–206. Paula Murphy provides a thoughtful review of the wide contribution of Irish sculptors at mid-nineteenth century Great Exhibitions: P. Murphy, ‘British sculpture’, pp. 64–73 (see note 2 above).

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stand for Ireland’s recognition of Britain’s courageous resistance to a foreign and imperial authority. This interpretation is a very obvious parody of the actual relationship between Britain as colonizer and Ireland as colonized, and lends weight to Leon Litvak’s suggestion that the work was a form of ‘colonial mimcry.’12 The sculpture functions as a distorting mirror, fracturing and shifting the identifications between nation and its representation. I would suggest that Constantine Panormo’s Caractacus Unbound is an attempt to summarize the relationship between Britain and Ireland without fixing the place of either within the work. The projected nationality of neither Caractacus nor his conqueror is conclusive and it is possible, probable even, that when the sculpture was exhibited in 1851 Britain appeared as the Roman soldier rather than the Celtic warrior. Rome was, of course, often used as a metaphor of expanding industrial might of Britain. Thus, it is Britain, humbled but merciful, who releases from bondage an Irish hero that looks at the splendours of the imperial capital (now condensed in Crystal Palace) and says, ‘is it possible that a people possessed of such magnificence at home can envy me a humble cottage’.13 As Litvak points out, the Dublin Freeman’s Journal certainly understood that Panormo’s Caractacus was Irish.14 A National Collection? An Irish court, announced by the sculpture of Caractacus, is identified in the Illustrated Exhibitor (Figure 3.2) and named in a guide published by George Routledge (Figure 3.3).15 However, exhibits from Ireland did not officially form a separate collection at the Great Exhibition. Irish objects, of which there were around three hundred, were placed within the British section of the Great Exhibition, that is, in the western half of Crystal Palace and in the first and second volumes of the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (1851).16 The assimilation of Irish objects into British space at the Great Exhibition was a reflection of Ireland’s political status, incorporated into the United Kingdom since the Act of Union. What the Illustrated Exhibitor named the ‘Irish Court’ was actually a display of flax, an exhibition stand in a section devoted to British textiles (Figure 3.4). Thus the structures of the Great Exhibition confirmed the extent of British territory and state authority, but the terms applied to both Britain and Ireland in Great Exhibition publications were inconsistent. A frequent slippage between Britain, the United Kingdom and England runs through the writings of both

12 Litvak, p. 32. 13 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 151. 14 Litvak, p. 31. 15 A Guide to the Great Exhibition; containing a Description of every Principal Object of Interest. With a Plan, pointing out the easiest and most systematic way of examining the Contents of the Crystal Palace (London: George Routledge and Co., 1851). 16 The Official Catalogue, vols 1–2, pp. 131–846.

3.3

Plan, A Guide to the Great Exhibition; containing a Description of every Principal Object of Interest. With a Plan, pointing out the easiest and most systematic way of examining the Contents of the Crystal Palace (London: George Routledge and Co., 1851). Reproduced with thanks to Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

3.4

Plan, The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Vol. I (London: William Clowes and Spicer Brothers, 1851)

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those who organized and those who reported upon the Great Exhibition.17 Ireland was considered part of an ‘empire’ and called a ‘province’; it was also often claimed as a ‘sister isle’, ‘sister land’, ‘sister kingdom’, sometimes given the romantic titles ‘Sister of Erin’, ‘emerald isle’ or ‘Green Isle’, and, occasionally, identified as a nation.18 National and industrial were defining categories at the Great Exhibition. It had been the intention of the organizers to have ‘each similar article … placed in juxtaposition without reference to its nationality’,19 arranged according to Lyon Playfair’s classification system, which established industrial categories for its objects.20 The four sections of raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine arts for which the Great Exhibition’s classification is famous set out a process of industrial production, a transformation of natural substance into luxury commodity. Exhibits were distinguished as types of things according to their place in a narrative of industrial production and historical progress. However, the classification system was actually only applied to the United Kingdom and to India: the slow arrival of exhibits and exhibit information meant that foreign governments and colonial agencies were simply allocated space in Crystal Palace and their exhibits were listed together as collections in the Official Catalogue. In the end, objects were grouped according to geographical location and political status. An arrangement of national and colonial courts or stands prevailed inside Crystal Palace, and ‘United Kingdom’, ‘Colonies and Dependencies’ and ‘Foreign States’ were the headings within the Official Catalogue. Thus, the classification was only visible as a system in two places: in the first two volumes of the Official Catalogue, which contained a complete listing of the United Kingdom collection, and Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided (1852), which demonstrated how the Great Exhibition’s evaluative process was premised upon the divisions of the classification. The success and significance of Playfair’s classification was not its effect upon the arrangement 17 The Official Catalogue, vol. 1, pp. 113, 207, 262 for references to ‘England’, ‘Great Britain’ and ‘our country’. Henry Cole understood the success of the Great Exhibition to be English rather than British or relating to the United Kingdom: ‘On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851’, Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: David Bogue, 1853), pp. 419–51. 18 ‘A Lady’s Glance at the Great Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, Exhibition Supplement, XIX/503 (19 July 1851), p. 98; Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided (London: William Clowes, 1852), p. 69; Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, vol. 1 (London and New York: John Tallis, n.d.), p. 73; ‘The Ladies’ Department’, Tallis’s History, vol. 3, p. 40; ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, pp. 143, 146, 159. 19 Cole, ‘Introduction’, The Official Catalogue, vol. 1, p. 23. 20 See S. Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge, or William Whewell’s Eye’, in Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 35–7 for a discussion of Lyon Playfair’s classification system.

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of exhibits inside Crystal Palace, but its contribution to an industrial discourse. It provided a series of apparently descriptive but actually critical terms for objects that were widely used, not just by the official juries that determined the merits of particular objects but within all Great Exhibition commentaries that attempted to interpret the collection as a whole. Trying to make sense of the Great Exhibition displays is an important theme of the popular didactic guides. The overwhelming and confusing abundance inside Crystal Palace that is so often presented as the Great Exhibition experience is in marked contrast with the rigorous and laborious listing of exhibits in the Official Catalogues and Reports by the Juries. The creation of an ideal system of arrangement and the failure to put it into place meant that the Great Exhibition had two systems of display in operation at the same time: one that is associated with the museum (the industrial order of the Official Catalogue) and another with the department store (the connections and juxtapositions of objects arranged for aesthetic effect on the national stands).21 While it would be useful to isolate and compare the meanings created within these two systems, the visitor to the Great Exhibition would also be a reader of its texts and thus the meaning of the Exhibition was produced between these two systems of display. Moreover, industrial and national did not belong to different ideological systems. The Great Exhibition made evident the extent to which national and industrial were overlapping categories. The relationship between industrial and national development is the subject of numerous commentaries. I want to cite just one lesser-known account which, like so many others, presents the forms of industry as the defining characteristic of a nation or a people, a ‘race’ in its terms. Under the heading ‘Foreign and Colonial Departments’, The Crystal Palace and its Contents (1852) discussed ‘Productions of Aboriginal States’: The first, and perhaps the most important and lasting impression received by an attentive visitor at the Great Exhibition, when looking through its vast collection of articles from every region on earth, is this – that all men differ as they may in other important points, more especially the uncivilised from the civilised, never the less obey one law in common: they all, without exception, but in different degrees of intensity, labour… the productions of those who are commonly called Aborigines, or the less civilised races – are substantially the inferior fruits of human industry. Yet they illustrate the primitive elements out of which the most advanced nations have elaborated their gorgeous and graceful, their eminently useful productions. The most polished nations may in them trace their own perfection backward to its source.22

21 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), p. 17. 22 The Crystal Palace and its Contents; Being an illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (London: W. M. Clark, 1852), p. 42. For other commentaries that conflate industrial and national development, see: ‘A Christmas Pudding’, Household Words, 2 (21 December 1850), pp. 300–304, cited in Lara Kriegel, ‘The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn (Durham, NC:

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There are a number of points that should be made here. First, the idea that it is a law of human nature to labour is a tenet of political economy. Political economy underpins this small piece of Great Exhibition commentary as well as, I would suggest, the Great Exhibition itself. The Great Exhibition’s project to report world development through displays of industry was a huge exercise in political economy.23 Its organizers included influential liberal politicians who developed political economy as both a philosophy and a practice of government24 successfully propagating its doctrine relating to the benefits of industrial production: industriousness delivered moral as well as material progress. Forms of labour thus carried enormous social significance. In The Crystal Palace and its Contents, the labour process is not only a physical transformation, a repeatable manufacturing process that, for example, turns raw materials into fine arts, but an historical development that can be mapped from ‘inferior fruits’ to the ‘gorgeous’, ‘graceful’ and ‘useful’. Here, industrialization is imposed, retrospectively, as a world history; its increasingly specialized forms of labour are read as stages in human progress. National success was assumed from industrial development. Ireland had no place in the Great Exhibition’s hierarchies of nations, at least from the ‘official’ or organizers’ perspective. There is no basis for discussing a separate national collection of Irish objects under the terms of the Exhibition’s classification or the arrangements of its collection, since all were subsumed into the British section. However, while products from Ireland were defined as British, differences between Britain and Ireland were repeatedly identified. Ireland was subjected to contradictory processes; it was both assimilated and distanced. At the moment when Ireland is included in the same industrial national formation, testimony to its difference abounds. Although the Illustrated Exhibitor is unusual in its treatment of the Irish objects as a collection, most commentaries register the distinctiveness of exhibits from Ireland and explain their character as an effect of their place of production, a place recognized as both different and separate. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace (1851), for example, included an account of work exhibited by Mrs Anne Ward of Coleraine that insisted upon its Irishness. Ward exhibited an embroidered representation of the Giant’s Causeway, which was, according to Tallis: altogether Irish in design and execution, being worked in Ireland by Irish fingers in Irish linen. The original sketch was taken by an Irish lady, and the engraving

Duke University Press, 2003); William Whewell, ‘On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: David Bogue, 1852), pp. 3–34. 23 S. Dentith, Society and Cultural Forms in Nineteenth Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 40. 24 John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), p. 27, and Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 163 both identify the influence of Benthamites and Manchester School liberals on the Royal Commission of 1851.

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 brought out by an Irish publisher; the frame was also made of Irish oak, which once formed part of an old church in the vicinity.25

Naming Ireland, even with such persistence, was not necessarily an assertion of nationality but of regional difference. As Glenn Hooper argues, ‘Ireland after the Union was effectively regionalized within the broader political configuration.’ A degree of regional difference was acceptable; indeed, the United Kingdom was (and still is) constructed around a hierarchies of regional difference. As Hooper explains, Regionally-regarded Ireland could express difference but, significantly, only as part of a larger whole. Its native culture or language could suggest alternative origins and influences, but so long as the political trajectory was clearly enough understood, then difference could occasionally be admitted. Ireland was granted a degree of specificity, in other words, because a highly centralized Union could always subsume regional difference, or at the very least make it subordinate, to the larger political unit.26

The colonization of Ireland has been obscured, partially at least, through the assertion of regional status. But the categorization of Ireland as a region was not entirely successful in 1851: some Irish exhibits, such as Panormo’s Caractacus, contained, revealed and presented different versions of Irish nationhood. This chapter suggests that at different moments Ireland was received as a nation at the Great Exhibition despite being classified as a region. An examination of both a series of Irish exhibits and the account of them in the British periodical press undertaken here indicate that Ireland’s political status was unresolved and contested at the Great Exhibition. My chapter, then, is not about the selection process and what that might reveal about the attempts to project a particular identity of Ireland in Britain; it deals with the representation of objects once they arrived at the Great Exhibition. While it was open and for some time after it closed, the periodical press devoted entire issues to the Crystal Palace, its exhibits and their effects, or created new titles in order to comment upon the whole show and its constituent parts. Some of the most detailed reporting is contained in Great Exhibition supplements of the Illustrated London News, published more or less throughout the whole of 1851, and in the Illustrated Exhibitor, put out every week by Cassell between June and December for two pence. Publishing houses with a similar educational mission to Cassell, such as W. M. Clark and George Routledge, also issued small cheap guides. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace was more expensively produced, and was commemorative rather than overtly educational. In tracing the accounts of Irish objects through these kinds of Great Exhibition texts, reading them alongside 25 ‘The Ladies’ Department’, Tallis’s History, vol. 3, p. 43. This account also appears in ‘Ireland’s Contributions II’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 169. 26 Glenn Hooper, ‘The Pursuit of Signs: Searching for Ireland after the Union’, in Litvak and Hooper (eds), p. 216.

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‘The Last Irish Grievance’, Punch or the London Charivari, 21 (1851)

the organizers’ record contained in the Official Catalogue and Reports by the Juries, I am trying to consider the extent to which the representation of a colony was controlled within and from the colonizing country, and I am informed by those histories of the Great Exhibition that have understood it as an imperial project through which discourses of colonialism proliferated.27 My particular concern here is with identifying the different definitions of Irishness and Ireland’s political status that circulated through the Great Exhibition. Different meanings demonstrate the contradictions that underlie the relationship between Britain and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, and which still persist in the early twenty-first. Significantly, accounts of Irish objects reveal a more complex picture and one that was quite different from the typical representation of Irish subjects in Punch (Figure 3.5). I would suggest that Punch, and those popular satirical 27 Lara Kreigel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Purbrick (ed.), pp. 146–78; Kriegel, ‘The Pudding and the Palace’; Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 31–62.

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3.6

‘Altar Cloth.– Sisters of Mercy’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 10 (9 August 1851)

ephemera that the Great Exhibition generated, were only able to sustain the wellworn image of Ireland as barbaric and troublesome throughout the Exhibition because they did not attempt to deal with the actual products it displayed.28 28 See, for example, the representation of Irish figures in Punch, or the London Charivari, 21 (1851), pp. 6, 102, 108, 185, 223, and for an analysis of the persistence of such stereotypes, see Curtis, Nothing but the Same Old Story, pp. 53–6.

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Objects have not actually had a central place in Great Exhibition histories, which have tended to draw widely upon accounts of visitor experience within the periodical press and upon the articles that provided an account of sensation of the Great Exhibition, focusing in particular on the initial reaction of wonderment at the scale of the display.29 The mainstay of Great Exhibition reporting, however, was detailed accounts of exhibits and not those more evocative writings that usually introduce and occasionally punctuate the documentation of exhibits and their properties. Exhibit accounts have tended to be neglected by historians because the amount of detail, often technical, they present about individual exhibits seems disproportionate to that object’s importance within the Crystal Palace and thus unrepresentative of any overall meaning of the Great Exhibition. This form of Great Exhibition writing is really quite important because it draws extensively upon the exhibitors’ own descriptions of their exhibits. Reading commentaries on exhibits, reading exhibits themselves, and reading between them, help to trace some of the meanings that circulated through the Great Exhibition that were not generated by its organizers. Industrial Objects: Lace and Linen Of the three hundred Irish exhibits at the Great Exhibition, most were manufactures and two types can be identified: some objects were valued as art, others regarded as industrial.30 I want to work with this art and industry opposition to explore the meanings of the Irish collection, not, of course, in order to uphold any kind of aesthetic hierarchy, but because the art–industrial opposition is politically important: it projects different ideas about Irish nationhood. Linen was considered to be an Irish product. ‘During many centuries,’ it was claimed in Charles Tomlinson’s Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts (1852–54), ‘the production of linen in Ireland was so common it was almost regarded as the national manufacture.’31 The Illustrated Exhibitor, always putting the most positive spin on any manufactured work, asserted that ‘the term “Irish” is universally known as the name of the finest linen.’32 The decorative details of the finished forms of linen were reproduced in the periodical press to break up the close type and provide an alternative source of interest. The intricate patterns of lace were frequently shown for the same reasons (Figure 3.6). However, the meaning of linen and lace, the two textiles forms that I shall focus upon here,

29 Richards, pp. 17–72. 30 Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, argues that art and industry were not straightforwardly opposed at the Great Exhibition – see pp. 97–8. 31 ‘Flax’, in C. Tomlinson (ed.), Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts, Mechanical and Chemical, Manufactures, Mining and Engineering, vol. 1 (London and New York: James S. Virtue, 1862), p. 684. Charles Tomlinson also wrote parts of the Official Catalogue; he was one of the ‘scientific annotators’. 32 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 146.

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were not found in their decoration, but in their economic properties – that is, they were reviewed and discussed as industrial rather than aesthetic objects. Textiles have an important place in nineteenth-century narratives of progress. Engagement in textile production was fairly consistently interpreted as a sign of economic improvement, and this was certainly how textiles were regarded at the Great Exhibition. Mechanization of textile production was identified and celebrated in the Official Catalogue and many other commentaries as the instigator of the first phase of industrialization in Britain. This heightened the significance of textile production as a form of labour. All forms of labour had, or appeared to have, within the discourse of political economy a dual function: they could enact both a physical and historical transformation. Textile production had brought such changes to the British economy and social landscape that it seemed to prove the historical effect of the physical act of labour. The range of Irish textile products exhibited in 1851 (flax, linen, lace, muslin, poplin) involved different kinds of labour and demonstrated unevenness in the Irish industrial sector and thus some difficulty in fixing the national meanings of Ireland. Specific forms of textile production, the working of threads and cloth by hand or the creation of fibres and fabrics with machines, were interpreted as evidence of a particular stage of industrial improvement, historical development and national achievement. Linen and lace, the former mechanized and the latter handmade, exemplified the different directions of Irish industry. The general industrial improvement brought about by the textile industry in Ireland was employment. Lace, in particular, was praised for providing industrial work and teaching industrial behaviour. Young women and the poor were the subjects of an industrial project intended to alleviate distress through instilling the habits of industry, delivering work and lessons in work. The discussion of lace in Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace begins by observing that the ‘objects of greatest interest in relation to Ireland, are the means which are being taken to develop her industrial resources, and find employment for her people.’33 Other textiles provided work. For example the Illustrated London News explained that it felt compelled to praise Irish woollen work in order to do ‘justice to those seeking to employ a degraded and down-trodden peasantry’34 but this was the primary function of lace. The evaluation of ‘LACE made by hand’, including Limerick lace, in the Reports of the Juries concluded by emphasizing that it ‘gives suitable employment to a large number of females at their own houses, thereby increasing their comforts, encouraging habits of industry and adding to the general prosperity of the nation.’35 Similar comments were made about sewed muslin work. The jurors remarked upon the expansion of this branch of industry and noted ‘the workers being invariably employed in their own houses … they 33 ‘The Ladies’ Department’, Tallis’s History, vol. 3, p. 40. 34 ‘Irish Woollens’, Illustrated London News, Exhibition Supplement, XVIII/494 (14 June 1851), p. 569. 35 ‘Class XIX. Report on Tapestry, including Carpets, Floor-cloths, &c, Lace, Fancy Embroidery, and Industrial Works’, in Reports by the Juries, p. 464.

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can thus, by their own industry, increase their comforts without endangering their morals.’36 A combined belief in the morality of work and the improving effect of involvement in the market, which is characteristic of the industrial paternalism of the handmade textile sector generally,37 is especially prevalent in the discussion of mid-nineteenth-century post-Famine Ireland. The Great Exhibition, at least according to articles in the periodical press, demonstrated the success of paternalistic interventions that came from in and outside Ireland. Tallis’s account of lace continued with an account of how the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, had ‘influenced’ and ‘promoted’ the development of Belgian lace-making in Limerick, implying that he enabled or encouraged one of ‘the sisterhoods of nuns’ to bring in a Belgian female instructor. The periodical could now relate: … there are four lace factories, employing, together, not less than 1,000 girls, who earn not less than 1s. 6d. to 6s. per week, according to their proficiency. The designers earn from 6s. to 7s. per week. In the convents, the lace making is taught as a branch of industrial education. The enlargement of this branch of manufacture is [of] immense importance to Ireland, as it will afford employment for the young female population. We have personally visited these establishments, and can bear witness that this employment is equally sought, and that the girls are industrious, docile and well-conducted.38

The Illustrated London News noted that the ‘Irish Work Society also exhibits the results of its exertions in the promotion of Irish Industry; and the Ladies Industrial Society of Dublin shows to what extent hand labour of the Irish poor has of late been made subservient to commercial purposes and social progress.’39 All Great Exhibition accounts address their readers as if disaster or destitution in Ireland was well known, but few commentaries mention the Famine or Hunger by name. The Illustrated Exhibitor opens its Irish issue with optimism about the future of Ireland and a plea not to dwell upon the past: ‘Why should we say anything about it?’40 This periodical, however, did attempt a discussion. It argues that ‘active benevolence … gives us the strongest reason to hope that a brighter day will yet dawn on the Sister-land’, and describes that day as one ‘when famine and despair shall no longer tempt to crime, when the Irish peasant shall be as industrious and prosperous in his own land as he invariably is when exiled from it.’41

36 Ibid., p. 465. 37 D. Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 110; A. Cullen, ‘Sexual Division of Labour in the Arts and Crafts’, Woman’s Art Journal (Winter 1985), pp. 1–6. 38 ‘The Ladies’ Department’, Tallis’s History, vol. 3, p. 40; and see also ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 169. 39 ‘Lace and Embroidery’, Illustrated London News, Exhibition Supplement, XVIII/484 (10 May 1851), p. 396. 40 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 141. 41 Ibid., p. 169.

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Box top designed by S. McCloy of the Belfast School of Design for Mr McCracken, The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations 1851)

While the Illustrated Exhibitor attempts to redeem the Irish character by praising (and patronizing) the working Irish immigrants, the periodical also sustained the stereotype: the lazy Irish subject. Condemning those who are reluctant to work or just reluctant to embrace work, to do it willingly, is a feature of industrial colonial morality. The idle worker is familiar from other colonial contexts where bourgeois ideas were dominant; he, and it is usually a male worker, is a figure of a colonizing vision transposed onto those who carry out forms of enforced labour, slaves and peasants especially, who may appear lazy in the moments when they refuse to perform the act of their own oppression. A quite dense set of ideas about industrial and moral progress are invested in the figure of the idle worker. Laziness is the antithesis of the nineteenth-century doctrine of self-help and the precursor to labour; it is the stationary state before the civilizing force of labour takes effect. In the terms of political economy, a lazy worker is a subject unmotivated to leave the pleasures of immediate consumption

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to take up the strategies of deferral that led to forms of capital accumulation and material, moral, social and national progress. Again, labour defines the historical moment. Distinctions between backward and dynamic, savage and civilized turn upon an assumption about being willing and unwilling to work.42 The existence of ‘famine and despair’ in Ireland thus becomes the fault of the Irish people, of their character, and this is why the Illustrated Exhibitor feels it is doing a kindness to state that it is all in the past. The production of flax was mechanized and was therefore usually represented within Great Exhibition texts as the most unambiguously successful Irish product and certainly more progressive than lace, which was only a short stage away from poverty and peasantry (Figure 3.7). Nevertheless, a characterization of Irish workers as lazy occurs in at least one account. Tomlinson’s Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts (a text that claimed to offer the same scope as the Great Exhibition but in a written form) began its entry by stating that the ‘capability of Great Britain and Ireland to produce this crop in perfection is now generally admitted’, but reminded readers that ‘the want of care in its cultivation, which characterises our people, and especially the Irish peasantry, is … fully known.’ Proof of this is provided in a document ‘published by the Belgian government in 1841’ and cited as an authoritative view from a key flax-producing country of how, in Ireland, the fibre had been prepared for production: The flax of Ireland, when first pulled, is as good as ours, but the Irish are negligent. Our flax is immediately put in water, theirs is left to get heated in the air, while they go away to drink and enjoy themselves. Our peasants are watchful, and take out the flax at the end of five or eight days, according to the condition they find it in. The Irish do it just when they please. Our flax, when covered in mud, is spread out carefully in a fine meadow, when the first shower cleanses it; in Ireland, it is thrown down almost anywhere.43

These preparatory processes had changed. In a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts, James Macadam Jr, Secretary of the Royal Society for the Improvement of the Cultivation of Flax in Ireland, described the current method of steeping flax in water-filled vats heated by steam pipes: In place of the individual growers taking up the critical operation of steeping once a year, there is a regularly organised establishment, where this business is constantly carried on, and the workers, consequently become very expert; as an instance of which may be stated, that is one of the Irish retteries fifty persons now can do the work that eighty were required for at first, so greatly they have acquired facility of manipulation from a twelvemonth’s practice.44 42 M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 137, 143. 43 ‘Flax’, Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts, p. 673. 44 J. Macadam, Jr, ‘The Production of Flax Plant, &c’, in Lectures, p. 62. James Macadam Jr also sat on the Belfast Great Exhibition committee (see note 10). The Royal Society for the Improvement of the Cultivation of Flax was also referred to the Royal

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3.8

‘Clarendon Ardoyne’, Mr Andrews, The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations 1851

Society for the Promotion and Improvement of the Growth of Flax in Ireland, and the Official Catalogue, Supplementary Volume, lists a Royal Belfast Flax Improvement Society (p. 1487).

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While Macadam’s belief in the benefits of industrial centralization and specialization associated with the division of labour are worthy of note, it is the representation of Irish workers as expert and efficient to which I would like to draw attention here, and the fact that contradictory accounts of Irish labour and Irishness circulated at the same time, sometimes explicitly as the past and present of Ireland. Ireland was allocated different positions in the political economic scales of national progress, but there was a general consensus that, at the Great Exhibition, industrial improvement was demonstrated. The Royal Society for the Improvement of the Cultivation of Flax, for example, was recommended by one jury for the highest honour of a Council Medal ‘for their preserving and successful effort to improve the growth and preparation of flax in the British Empire.’45 Another jury also set out the improved position of the final product of flax manufacture. Great Britain and Ireland were ‘not much noted’ for handspun linen, but the application of cotton technologies had changed that. Ireland ‘has now for many years enjoyed a high and merited reputation for its linen manufactures, and supplied large quantities of the usual kinds to the different markets of the world.’46 Some commentators gave unequivocally high praise to Irish linen. George Routledge’s A Guide to the Great Exhibition related that among ‘sheetings, diapers, and linen cambrics’ that constituted the ‘contributions from Ireland’ are ‘some really beautiful articles, by Mr Hemming, of Belfast.’ The guide insisted that he ‘has produced some linen cambric as fine as anything of the kind ever woven in France.’47 Work of the Belfast School of Design, exhibited by Mr Andrews, was widely illustrated and received some critical approval in the Art-Journal (Figure 3.8; and see Figure 3.7 also) as well as the Illustrated Exhibitor.48 Patterns, which often entwined shamrocks, thistles and roses, conformed to the principles of good design promoted by design reformers and organizers of the Great Exhibition, Henry Cole and his circle. It was much more common, however, to claim that Irish linen lacked an aesthetic dimension. The jury that dealt with linen reported that ‘Ireland is producing, very extensively, both lawns and handkerchiefs, more distinguished, without doubt, in the lower and middlepriced qualities for general consumption than in the extremely fine goods.’49 The Illustrated London News claimed that ‘many of the specimens of damask 45 ‘Class IV. Report on Animal and Vegetable Substances, chiefly used in Manufactures, as Implements, or for Ornaments’, in Reports by the Juries, p. 69. A note at the bottom of this page reads, ‘Owing to technical objections, this Council Medal was not passed by the Council Chairman.’ 46 ‘Class XIV. Report on Manufactures from Flax and Hemp’, in Report by the Juries, p. 369. 47 A Guide to the Great Exhibition, p. 74. 48 The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations 1851 (Newton Abbott: David and Charles Reprints, 1970), pp. 166–8. Views about the aesthetics of Irish exhibits varied with the editorial positions of the periodical press. The Illustrated Exhibitor, which presented the most optimistic accounts of Irish industry, also emphasized the beauty of Irish products (see ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, pp. 167–8). 49 ‘Class XIV’, Reports by the Juries, p. 369.

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3.9

‘Group in Bog-Yew’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 9 (2 August 1851)

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3.10

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‘Bog Wood Teapoy,’ Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1 (London and New York: John Tallis, n.d.)

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table linen’ were ‘of first rate character alike in design and execution’, but that ‘the artistic part is susceptible of a large amount of improvement.’50 Thus Ireland was represented as becoming industrial. ‘Developing’ is, of course, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century term used to describe this condition. Lace production was evidence of Ireland being in the early stages of industrial development, learning the habit of work, while linen represented a later or higher stage of mechanization enabling competitive engagement in the world market. ‘Developing’ positions Ireland as somewhere between an ‘aboriginal’ state and Britain, between the primitive and the civilized, between agricultural and industrial, between ‘famine and despair’ and solid, permanent prosperity. Thus being ‘developed’ does not undo the colonial hierarchy of dynamic and backward economies; in fact, the need to be developed is a sign of a naturally or, at least, historically backward nation. While ‘developing’ offers the possibility of future equality with the already industrialized, it also positions that nation in the present moment as secondary with the necessity of further industrial development justifying continued colonial intervention and assimilation to colonial culture. Art Objects: Furniture Art objects, or rather objects classified as art rather than squeezed into industrial narratives, tell another kind of national narrative. Arthur Jones of Stephen’s Green, Dublin exhibited eighteen pieces of furniture in the Crystal Palace. These exhibits, like linen and lace, were highly decorated objects, and were treated as aesthetic rather than industrial exhibits. They were listed twice in the Official Catalogue, under Class 26, Furniture and Class 30, Fine Art. The entry in the Furniture Class announced a ‘series of Irish bog-yew decorative furniture, designed to illustrate the history, antiquities, animal and vegetable productions, & c. of Ireland.’51 The entry in the Fine Art section called the exhibits ‘a suite of sculptured decorative furniture made of Irish bog-yew; with embellishments derived from objects of interest in Ireland, as its monarchs, illustrious characters, historic events, productions, emblems, mottoes, legends, monuments, antiquities & c.’52 The furniture was displayed in the Fine Arts Court (Figure 3.9). Arthur Jones’s work was widely illustrated (Figure 3.10). Engravings of his armchair, firescreens, wine-cooler, teapoy, music temple and lady’s work-table appeared in the Official Catalogue and were reproduced in all the Great Exhibition periodicals. All these images show densely decorated objects: rococo scrolls combined with classical forms, allegorical figures placed on top of realistically detailed landscapes featuring the naturalistic forms of animals, and the whole surrounded with emblematic devices. The excessive carving demonstrates both the skill of the maker and the wealth of the potential possessor. Richness was 50 ‘Textile Fabrics’, Illustrated London News, Exhibition Supplement, XVIII/482 (3 May 1851), p. 369. 51 ‘Class 26 Furniture’, The Official Catalogue, vol. 2, pp. 735–9. 52 ‘Class 30 Fine Art’, The Official Catalogue, vol. 2, p. 824.

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also evident in the material from which the furniture was made. The engravings do not give much idea of the quality of the polished wood. Bog-yew appeared glossy and dark; it had the properties of a precious stone. Lengthy descriptions, drawn from Arthur Jones’s submission to the Official Catalogue, usually accompanied the illustrations. I want to cite just one complete description of one item of furniture, a teapoy, a small three- or fourlegged table, reproduced in the Illustrated Exhibitor. This account, like others of similar exhibits, interpreted each component of the object in turn: This article, forming a receptacle for foreign produce, has been designed to represent the Ancient Commerce of Ireland: thus a figure of Commerce is placed on the summit, surrounded by the exports of Ireland. Emblematical bustos, copied from Flaxman’s figures on the south front of the Custom-house, Dublin, representing the four divisions of the earth, embellish the four corners; and behind each, on the lid of the teapoy, are groupings characteristic of the Military, Scientific, and Literary Genius of the four great divisions of the ancient world. The intermediate spaces contain specimens of their most remarkable vegetable productions. The front panel, in bass relief, represents Hibernia inviting Commerce (symbolised by a Tyrian merchant galley) to the shores of Ireland: she is seated beneath the basalt cliffs of the Giant’s Causeway – the giant deer on its heights. The article being specially a lady’s piece of furniture, the appropriate legendary ballad of ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore,’ by Thomas Moore, Esq., furnish three scenes to enrich the other fronts. The support of this elaborate piece of workmanship presents the Chase of the Giant Deer by Wolf Dogs: the noble animal appears bounding through the oak forest, and suddenly entangled by his antlers – the dogs rushing to their prey.53

The need to narrate the Exhibition’s objects has been considered by Nikolas Pevsner as a design failure. Arthur Jones’s furniture is included in his High Victorian Design (1951) as illustrations of superfluous and conspicuous decoration desired by the Victorian bourgeoisie.54 Pevsner added a class dimension to the problem of mid-nineteenth-century industrial aesthetics that had already been identified by the Great Exhibition’s organizers and officials. The jury report on ‘Decorative Furniture and Upholstery’ was highly critical of what it considered to be an inappropriate amount of decorative detail that was typical of these exhibits: It is not necessary that an object be covered with ornament, or be extravagant in form, to obtain an element of beauty; articles of furniture are too often crowded with unnecessary embellishment, which besides adding to their cost, interferes with their use, purpose, and convenience; the perfection of art manufacture consists in combining the useful with the pleasing, and the execution of this can generally be most successfully carried out by adopting the simplest process.55

53 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 144. 54 Nikolaus Pevsner, High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibits of 1851 (London: Architectural Press, 1951), p. 113. 55 ‘Class XXVI. Report on Decorative Furniture and Upholstery, including PaperHangings, Papier Mache, and Japanned Goods’, in Reports by the Juries, p. 544.

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3.11

Fourdinois Sideboard, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1 (London and New York: John Tallis, n.d.)

The case for utilitarian aesthetics as best practice in industrial production is made in Richard Redgrave’s influential ‘Supplementary Report on Design’.56 Redgrave’s ‘Report’ and this lesser-known one on ‘Decorative Furniture’ employed the same strategy; their argument for prioritizing function over form begins with an attack on the value of ornament. Shelagh Wilson has suggested that forms that were beginning to be chastized as badly designed and criticized for their excessiveness, for too much decoration and for attempting realistic detailing rather than restrained simplification of natural forms (grotesques in particular, but also objects that might now be considered kitsch) should be 56 R. Redgrave, ‘Supplementary Report on Design’, in Reports by the Juries, pp. 708–49.

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regarded and reclaimed as demonstrations of popular resistance to emergent official expertise.57 Arthur Jones’s work can quite readily be interpreted as an assertion of values of craft practice against industrial patterning. The impossibility of stamping out Jones’s designs is displayed through the complexity of each piece of his furniture. Such resistant forms have a particular significance in colonial contexts: they are not examples of mimicry, which, like Panormo’s Caractacus, employ elite or dominant conventions of representation with subtly destabilizing effect; they are a more overt form of opposition. The suite of furniture is a grand and confident show of skill that is impossible to mechanize, of patterns that cannot be readily reproduced, and of a culture of creativity that does not conform to either industrialization or Britain, industrialization’s most powerful national representative. Arthur Jones received an Honourable Mention from the ‘Decorative Furniture’ jury. His work had been judged alongside the highly acclaimed sideboard exhibited by A. G. Fourdinois of France. Fourdinois was awarded the highest prize in the class, a Council Medal, despite being criticized for the decorative excess of the sideboard along with all the other pieces of furniture, as well as being singled out for its elitism and expense (Figure 3.11).58 Great Exhibition publications often reviewed Jones and Fourdinois together. Their furniture not only had a similar commitment to decoration, but shared an ‘iconography of dining’, to use a phrase belonging to Kenneth Ames.59 Representational likenesses of animal and vegetable forms overwhelm both objects, and both could be considered as versions of nineteenth-century grotesque design. The absence of any stylization of natural subjects certainly meant that they were examples of what was understood, by nineteenth-century design reformers, to be false principles of construction and thus bad taste. While the works of Arthur Jones and A. G. Fourdinois are obviously not alike in every aspect, I have found that Kenneth Ames’s study Death in the Dining Room (1992), which examines forms of dining furniture that can be traced back to the Fourdinois archetype, can be useful in informing a reading of Jones’s work because it attempts to recover nineteenth-century meanings of forms that present difficulties for the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century reader who might find them ridiculous, mawkish, horrible. The natural forms that cover Fourdinois’s sideboard and Jones’s suite of furniture appear animated; they are too life-like. Nature is brought too near to the modern viewer and much too close for the modern domestic user. Imagery upon the furniture has not been mediated enough through the process of its production. These objects have not been sufficiently designed.

57 S. Wilson, ‘Monsters And Monstrosities: Grotesque Taste and Victorian Design’, in C. Trodd, P. Barlow and D. Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 143–72. 58 ‘Class XXVI’, Reports by the Juries, p. 544. 59 K. L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), p. 44.

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Fourdinois’s and Jones’s 1851 exhibits appear in opposition to emergent dominant ideas of good taste because they are crafted rather than designed and have allowed the imagery, or ‘ornament’ in the terms of nineteenth-century design criticism, too much presence. Animals that are close to death, dying or dead are realistically rendered and prominently displayed on both. Hunting scenes express, according to Ames, the key themes of dining furniture: bounty and domination. Both are best encapsulated by the moment just before or just after the kill.60 The centrepiece of the Fourdinois sideboard is a dead deer, and on the base of Jones’s table a deer is trapped and about to be killed. Ames argues that the appeal of dying animals is based on the political associations of the hunt. The capture and killing of a wild animal dramatically summarized the conquering of nature61 and this victory was celebrated in wood, elaborately framed and honoured with decorative detailing. Violence is endorsed as the method of man’s civilizing mission. Bounty and domination are evident in Jones’s teapoy and cast as a national achievement. The excessively carved image of agricultural plenty is unmistakably Irish. It presents Ireland as a geopolitical entity, as a national territory, through its most famous geographical site (the Giant’s Causeway), an allegory of nationhood (Hibernia), a national monument (the Custom House), and a popular emblem (the wolfhound). So if, as Ames argues, the physical capture shown by the hunt symbolizes political mastery, this small table demonstrates Irish control of Irish land. The teapoy, ‘representative of the ancient Commerce of Ireland’, shows the country abundant (as opposed to starving), as a trading power and as already civilized (rather than needing development).62 Jones’s furniture, an example of nineteenth-century tourist art, export art for the British elite, can be read also as Irish art, as a national if not nationalist form. Other pieces, the Music Temple for example, display Ireland’s ancient rulers. ‘Ollamh Foudla (Ollav Folla), the founder of the Irish monarchy’, is shown, it is explained in Tallis’s History, ‘delivering the laws to the Irish nation; with his left hand he points to heaven as the source of his authority and inspiration, while in his right he holds … the Brehon Laws engraved in the ancient Irish character.’63 The celebration of ‘pre-invasion’ history characterized the Celtic

60 Ames, p. 55. 61 Ibid., p. 67–76. 62 ‘Ireland’s Contributions’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 144 (see note 53). The North American sideboards that are the focus of Ames’s study also ‘nationalized’ the furniture, with bald eagles and Native American hunters. The teapoy also reverses the feminization of Ireland as dependent colony. See F. Barber, Relocating History: An Exhibition of Work by 7 Irish Women Artists (Belfast: The Fenderesky Gallery; Derry: The Orchard Gallery, 1993). 63 Tallis’s History, vol. 1, pp. 73–4, and also ‘Ireland’s Contributions II’, Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 164. For a wider discussion of bog-wood as a national form and as a souvenir, see Amy M. Kirschke, ‘The Dear Ould Sod: Irish-Americans Consuming “Irishness” through Bog Oak Souvenirs’, paper presented at the Design History Society

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Revival, of which Jones’s furniture was an early contributor. Carving scenes of self-government from bog-yew performed the work of historical recovery, a reclamation of an ancient past. Bog-yews are ancient timbers, preserved in peat; they are fossil-like and are part of the physical structure of the land. These 1851 exhibits appeared, then, like buried evidence of Ireland’s success when it ruled itself. Conclusion All Irish exhibits in 1851, whatever they were made of and whatever part of Ireland they were from, produced an image of Ireland as industrious that eclipsed, partially and momentarily, the view that it was an inevitably impoverished agricultural economy. However, specific and contrasting accounts of Ireland were articulated through the different kinds of Irish manufactures exhibited in 1851. Intricately stitched patterns in lace (and other fabrics) functioned as signs of preparedness to work, of obediently conforming to an industrial order. The ‘good’ design assimilated through the work of the Belfast School of Design and reproduced by Belfast linen manufacturers demonstrated the ability of Ireland to follow the path of modernization, whereas the carved forms of Dublin furniture-maker Arthur Jones comprised a kind of virtuoso performance of continuing craft skill in this industrializing world. Historical independence is inscribed on wood, while the production of textiles is drawn into a narrative of British industrial improvement. Thus two divergent ideas about national status were contained in Irish objects at the Great Exhibition of 1851: nationhood was either premised upon the modernizing efforts of industry and could be achieved at some easily deferred moment in the future, or it had existed when Irish land was productive and it could be reclaimed.

conference ‘On the Edge? Design and Material Culture in and out of Ireland’, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire. 64 J. Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). Jeanne Sheehy identified a series of strategies, employed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, particularly in popular, applied, commercial art, like the work of Arthur Jones, to represent ‘national feeling’. These were the use of Irish symbols (such as harps, shamrocks and wolfhounds), Irish subjectmatter (often Irish kings), and the production of ancient copies. Jones’s work entwined (often literally) symbols and subject-matters. Copies also formed part of the Irish collection at the Great Exhibition with, most famously, Waterhouse’s Tara Brooch. The exhibition of historical copies is the recognized expression of national identity at Great Exhibitions. See ‘Ireland’s Contributions’ and ‘Ireland’s Contributions II’, Illustrated Exhibitor, pp. 153, 165, 177.

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Chapter 4

‘A Valuable and Tolerably Extensive Collection of Native and Other Products’: New Zealand at the Crystal Palace Ewan Johnston

Z was a Zealander, once a man eater. But he now raises flax and is quite a tame creature.1

When the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa opened its doors in February 1998, one of its galleries contained an exhibit entitled ‘Exhibiting Ourselves’. Within this space were partial reconstructions of New Zealand’s displays at the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations; the 1906–1907 New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries held in Christchurch; the 1939–40 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in Wellington; and the Seville Expo of 1992. New Zealand’s shifting representations at international exhibitions – both internationally and within New Zealand itself – can be read as moments in the construction of national, or at least Pakeha, histories and other stories, traditions and identities. These representations were necessarily modified, not only depending on the site of each exhibition, but also on the images that successive exhibit organizers sought to project to their presumed audiences. While the primary focus of the international exhibitions was trade, it was predominantly the use of New Zealand’s unique natural environment – including its geothermal wonders and the extinct giant flightless bird, the Moa – and the use of Maori people and cultural objects in these displays that enabled the construction of a distinctive and appealing identity. This was deemed essential in order to distinguish New Zealand from the other Australasian colonies, in particular, in the competition for emigrants, investment and trade. But more can be read into the successive representations of New Zealand than the construction of identity. The ways in which New Zealand was represented through carefully selected exhibits, and their accompanying literature, reflected the attitudes of those people involved in these reconstructions not only towards the products and attributes 1 ‘An Alphabetical List of Visitors and Exhibitors to the Crystal House which Albert built, 1851’. A souvenir of the 1851 Exhibition, printed on cotton. Reproduction displayed in the ‘Exhibiting Ourselves’ Exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 1998.

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of the country itself at given times, but also towards its place within the larger imperial context. While New Zealand’s small contribution to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was generally overlooked and overshadowed, it formed the nucleus of what was to become, albeit with modifications, a pattern of representation. At the 1851 Exhibition, the British colonies were exhibited as a group at the centre of the British exhibits in the western half of the Crystal Palace. Their centrality belied their geographical but not their conceptual location in reinforcing the growing significance of the empire.2 However, it was later noted that ‘in 1851 the colonies were as a whole almost unrepresented. The notice given was too short; the undertaking was hurried; the project was quite new and not clearly understood, and moreover, most of the colonies were scarcely in a position to go to much expense for contributions’. The ‘Australasian colonies’, it was stated, ‘were but poorly represented, although a few made some efforts to put in an appearance. The New South Wales and Tasmanian collections were creditable, and a few things were sent from South Australia and New Zealand.’3 Despite such apparent paucity, the Official Catalogue referred to the New Zealand exhibit as ‘a valuable and tolerably extensive collection of native and other products’.4 The ‘few things’ sent from New Zealand formed an exhibit that subordinated the colony to the empire, with the emphasis firmly placed on the potential for profit in the natural resources of the new colony, notably in its minerals and its indigenous vegetation. Ownership of these resources was unquestioned. New Zealand, as with Britain’s other colonies and dependencies, was seen as a source of raw material for metropolitan consumption. Most colonial exhibits were therefore incorporated into the carefully constructed taxonomy of the Official Catalogue (as well as the Exhibition) under Classes I–IV: Raw Materials. These products – and exhibits – as Jeffrey Auerbach has noted, ‘constituted the base of the pyramid of production and the source of British power’.5 The cover of the Official Catalogue justified such use of the earth’s resources in the name of God: The Earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is: The compass of the world and they that dwell therein … Say not the discoveries we make are not our own – The germs of every art are implanted within us, 2 New Zealand, along with the other Australasian colonies, was located next to the South Entrance. Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), pp. 12–13. 3 Mr Hollinshead, ‘History of Exhibitions’, in Official Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition, London 1862 (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners, 1862). 4 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), vol. 2, p. 1000. 5 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 98.

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And God our instructor, from hidden sources, Develops the faculties of invention … The progress of the human race, Resulting from the common labour of all men, Ought to be the final object of the exertion of each individual. In promoting this end, We are accomplishing the will of the great and blessed God.

The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be seen as both an example of, and a metaphor for the imperial idea. At the same time, they existed as carefully planned and arranged set pieces of imperial propaganda. Justifications for imperial expansion, the subjugation of indigenous peoples, and the consumption of their natural resources were appropriated through their display at (and to) the metropole. While it was not until the 1880s that imperialism became a dominant theme of the international exhibitions, all exhibitions organized by imperial powers were essentially imperial exhibitions, and likewise the exhibits of these powers at other exhibitions were representations of their empires, the metropolitan nation being part of the imperial whole. Anne McClintock, for one, has identified the 1851 Exhibition as ‘an imperial commodity spectacle’. At the exhibitions, she claims, ‘an emerging national narrative began to include the working class into the Progress narrative as consumers of national spectacle. Implicit in the Exhibition was the new experience of imperial progress consumed as national spectacle. At the Exhibition, white British workers could feel included in the imperial nation, the voyeuristic spectacle of racial “superiority” compensating them for their class subordination.’6 This, as McClintock demonstrates, was made manifest in the use of empire in contemporary advertising. Not everyone agreed with such notions at the time of the Exhibition. The Chartist G. Julian Harney, for example, condemned the contents of the Crystal Palace as ‘plunder, wrung from the people of all lands, by their conquerors, the men of blood, privilege, and capital.’7 At the time of the Exhibition, New Zealand remained relatively unknown. Brought into the British imagination in the wake of Cook’s first Pacific voyage, it had only been appropriated into the empire just over a decade before the Crystal Palace Exhibition, with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The landscape was still in the process of being explored, mapped, catalogued, and thereby known and possessed. European (predominantly British) settlement, while spreading, remained relatively hesitant, and increasing cross-cultural contact often led to hostilities. Inter-tribal conflicts had been exacerbated by uneven access to new ideas and technologies, most dramatically in the so-called ‘Musket Wars’ that lasted from about 1818 until about 1833, and between March 1845 and January 1846, the first major conflict between 6 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 59. 7 G. Julian Harney, The Friend of the People, 22 (10 May 1851), p. 152, cited in Auerbach, p. 132.

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Maori and British imperial and colonial forces took place. The ‘Northern War’ was fought in the area around the Bay of Islands and Waitangi itself, north of Auckland, culminating in the Battle of Ruapekapeka. Fighting also took place further south, around Wellington in 1846 and at Whanganui during the following year.8 One of the main causes of these conflicts was large-scale land purchasing and the government-supported settler expansion that followed. Among these settlements were the ‘instant townships’ created in the 1840s by the New Zealand Company founded in 1838 by Edward Gibbon Wakefield.9 Fundamental to these schemes was the production of printed propaganda to encourage intending emigrants. Liberties were taken to portray New Zealand – and the sites of intended Wakefield settlements in particular – as a peaceful, almost tropical, prosperous location, ideal for colonization. By 1851, the popular perception of New Zealand in Britain was somewhat confused. In the colony itself, the realities and difficulties were more clear-cut. The New Zealand exhibits at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition can be best described as miscellaneous. As with the event itself, New Zealand’s representation was both ‘planned and … spontaneous’.10 The majority of the colony’s exhibits were from the north, illustrating the population distribution of settler communities in New Zealand in 1851, and signifying the importance of Auckland, and the Province of New Ulster, in this stage of the colony’s history.11 It was here that the governor of the colony, Sir George Grey, was situated, and seeing the opportunity to portray his colony in a positive light following the conflicts of the 1840s, he was to take a personal interest in the organization of the exhibit. The Exhibition’s official ‘Report on Mining, Quarrying, Metallurgical Operations, and Mineral Products’ remarked that New Zealand ‘appears to have been the subject of a serious geological study. Eight persons have exhibited ores which are the result of their explorations, and some of the ores are already the subject of practical workings. We may particularly refer to the coal of Waikato, and the copper mines of [Kawau Island].’ Sulphur from White Island, pumice from Waikato, limestone, ‘building stone’, ironsand, manganese, and iron from ‘the first casting at Auckland foundry 18th December 1850’

8 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986). 9 Ibid., p. 20. See also Patricia Burns, Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), and Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002). 10 Auerbach, p. 230. 11 The short-lived and ‘nominal’ division of the colony of New Zealand into New Ulster and New Munster, along the line of the Patea River, lasted from 1848 until 1853. James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), p. 191. Auckland was established in 1840–41; Wellington, Nelson and New Plymouth between 1840 and 1842; and Dunedin and Christchurch in 1848 and 1850.

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12

were also displayed. Timber was displayed and classified in Class IV: ‘Animal and Vegetable Substances, chiefly used in manufactures, as implements, or for ornaments’, and a number of ‘small collections’ of New Zealand timber were awarded Honourable Mentions.13 One exhibitor, R. Lucas and Co., submitted specimens of New Zealand wood in the form of an octagonal table-top, veneered with eleven different woods, a sofa table-top veneered with three specimens, a small circular inlaid table, a ‘watnot, with twisted columns, veneered with three specimens’, and a ‘papeterie, with hinged flap and sliding secret panels, fluted with green silk.’14 A Prize Medal was awarded to W. Brown for an exhibit of Kauri gum, described in the report as ‘Kauri, or cowree copal, the produce of Dammara Australis, a beautiful resin from New Zealand’. Also included in this section was a display of tanning barks accompanied by examples of hides that had been treated using the different barks, ‘Towai, Tanekaha, and Hinau’. When Lieutenant James Cook first visited New Zealand in 1769, he praised the resources of the country, noting in particular the fertility of its soil and the excellent quality of its timber and native flax. ‘He had fancied that were it “settled by an Industrious people they would very soon be supply’d not only with the necessarys but many of the luxuries of life”.’15 A trans-Tasman trade in flax had developed in the 1820s with Sydney firms negotiating directly with Maori along the coast of the North Island, exchanging dressed flax for European goods including guns.16 Within the Crystal Palace, specimens of flax made up a considerable proportion of the New Zealand exhibit. Honourable Mention was made of several exhibitors, including ‘a valuable and instructive series of samples … contributed by E. W. Trent … in illustration of its manufacture and uses’. ‘The flax’, it was noted, ‘is prepared from the leaves of the Phormium tenax, without any process of steeping, and by a simple mechanical process, which the exhibitor suggests might be advantageously carried on in New Zealand itself’.17 The Rev. J. Collinson of Gateshead contributed exhibits of flax including a ‘small bag made … by a lady in New Zealand’ and a ‘mat … made by the natives, being their usual clothing’. A Miss King of New Plymouth exhibited a kete, or ‘reticule, made of New Zealand flax, dyed from New Zealand woods, the pattern and work copied from the mat of a New Zealander’.18 As with the 12 Royal Commission for the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, Reports by the Juries on the subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1852), p. 15; Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, pp. 182–3. 13 Royal Commission, Reports by the Juries, p. 149. 14 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 183. 15 Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 33. 16 Ibid., p. 38. 17 Royal Commission, Reports by the Juries, pp. 76, 90, 93, 101. 18 This is likely to have been Maria King, whose sister Martha was later described as New Zealand’s first resident botanical artist. Moira M. Long, ‘King, Martha’ in W. H. Oliver (ed.), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume One 1769– 1869 (DNZB) (Wellington: Allen & Unwin; Department of Internal Affairs, 1990),

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exhibits of rope made from the Australian Gymea or Gigantic Lily displayed in the Australian sections, New Zealand flax was displayed in its manufactured state, in the form of twine and line.19 The display of both raw and manufactured material ready for metropolitan consumption was a common element in the representations of non-European and, particularly, colonial territories. Governor Grey singled out the Phormium tenax exhibits for the ‘particular attention of the Commissioners’, as ‘form[ing] at present one of the principal exports from the Province of New Ulster.’20 The official ‘Report on Substances used as Food’ noted that ‘New Zealand is represented by wheat, barley, and malt, all of good character’. Honourable Mentions were awarded to exhibits of barley and of malt, though examples of New Zealand maize were ill received, the Report noting that ‘it forms an indifferent crop’. Under the section of ‘Flours’, it was reported that ‘the New Zealand “Maori flour” (or flour produced by the natives) is deserving of notice.’21 This flour was exhibited by Rev. John Morgan of Otawhao, ‘as a proof of the progress of civilization amongst the New Zealanders.’ The bag of flour, he stated, ‘was grown by the Aborigines at Rangiaohia, near Otawhao, and ground in a water-mill, their own property, erected by them at a cost of 250l. sterling.’22 Missionaries such as Morgan and Collinson, due to their unique positions as intermediaries of contact, were thus enabled to exhibit ‘Maori manufactures’ reminiscent of the collections of ‘Native curios’ displayed by other collectors. But despite the inclusion of objects of Maori material culture, their place within New Zealand’s displays remained rather ambivalent. At London’s 1862 Exhibition, for example, the ill-fated Rev. Carl Sylvius Völkner (who would be killed by Maori at his Opotiki church in 1865) was awarded a medal for an exhibit of ‘mats and baskets, and a collection of native manufactures of New Zealand flax, chiefly native dresses’ – the medal going to the collector and exhibitor, rather than to the indigenous manufacturers.23 New Zealand exhibits at the Crystal Palace can also be found in the official report on ‘Miscellaneous Manufactures and Small Wares’. Included were a suitably miscellaneous collection of items that included soap, insects, specimens of wool, leather and skins, oil ‘from the humpbacked whale, caught at the Bay pp. 227–8. A sample of taniko-weaving attributed to Miss Maria King is now in the National Museum of Scotland. Amiria J. M. Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 128–9, 150. 19 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 182. 20 Governor Sir George Grey to Earl Grey, 28 October 1850, ‘Further Papers Relative to the Affairs of New Zealand’, 7 August 1851, p. 65, British Parliamentary Papers: Colonies, New Zealand (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), vol. 7. 21 Royal Commission, Reports by the Juries, pp. 53, 55. 22 Governor Sir George Grey to Earl Grey, 12 February 1851, ‘Further Papers’, 7 August 1851, p. 160. 23 John G. Knight (compiler), The Australasian Colonies at the International Exhibition, London, 1862. Extracts from the Reports of the Jurors and Other Information taken from Official Sources (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1865), p. 75; Evelyn Stokes, ‘Völkner, Carl Sylvius’, DNZB, vol. 1, pp. 566–7.

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of Plenty’, and ‘a box which may be regarded as a native dressing-case, as it is used by the aborigines to contain their head-dresses.’24 An exhibit submitted by St John’s Anglican Theological College, Auckland included ‘specimens of cloth and hat made by a native lad, aged 17 years, from wool grown, clean, carded, spun, and woven … and dyed with native woods’, along with hats and baskets made by ‘pensioners’.25 Lieutenant Henry Colin Balneavis, who had served in New Zealand with the 58th Regiment, exhibited a ‘model of a New Zealand war pah’. Balneavis, it was later recorded, ‘had made a life-long study of field tactics and fortifications; and a model of a Maori pa, constructed by him, and sent home to one of the English military colleges, created great interest at the time amongst military scientists in view of the astonishing resistance that these apparently flimsy strongholds had given to our troops, with all the appliances of modern warfare’.26 This model, Grey claimed, ‘will give people in England some idea of the ingenuity and knowledge of engineering displayed by what are supposed in England to be a race of ignorant savages.’27 While the model alluded to at least some degree of conflict in the distant islands, works of art by the surveyor and explorer Charles Heaphy and others tended to present a more idyllic picture. Such works contributed to the creation of an image of New Zealand as a place of great natural wonders, with Heaphy, for example, contributing a drawing of the volcanic White Island. P. G. Moore exhibited a ‘lithographic picture of a native village, or Pah, in New Zealand, situated in Cook’s Straits … after a large original, now in London, by Professor Gilfillan.’28 Gilfillan had sent his painting, ‘Interior of a Native Village or “Pa” in New Zealand’ to London in the care of Captain Moore to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. Arriving too late for inclusion in the 1849 Exhibition, it was shown elsewhere and used as propaganda by the New Zealand Company to which Moore was connected. Moore claimed that Prince Albert himself had suggested including the painting in the 1851 Exhibition, but the lithograph copy was used instead.29 Maori were depicted in Gilfillan’s original (and at the 24 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 182; Royal Commission, Reports by the Juries, p. 653. 25 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 182. 26 Thomas Wayth Gudgeon, The Defenders of New Zealand being a short biography of colonists who distinguished themselves in upholding her majesty’s supremacy in these islands (Auckland: Brett, 1887), p. 281. See Belich, The New Zealand Wars, pp. 58–64. 27 Governor Sir George Grey to Earl Grey, 28 October 1850, ‘Further Papers’, 7 August 1851, p. 66. After the Exhibition, the model was presented to the United Service Museum in London, and was later returned to New Zealand where it was rediscovered in the anthropology collection of the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, and is now on loan to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 28 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 183. 29 Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori 1840–1914 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992), p. 62. Bell suggests that the painting (which disappeared in the mid-1850s) is not, as was claimed by Moore in advancing the authenticity of the projected image, a literal recording of an actual scene, but rather

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Crystal Palace in the reproduction) as a peaceful and industrious people, at once allaying fears of their ferocity and at the same time reinforcing the projected representations of Maori as found in the displays of Maori ‘manufactures’. Leonard Bell has suggested that this image can be related ‘to the belief that successful colonisation required the civilising of Maori, their amalgamation into European socio-economic structures’, and that the peaceable nature of the village and the trappings of ‘civilisation’ implied this development. The way Maori were represented, he continues, ‘depended on factors such as the specific nature of the interactions between Maori and Europeans at a particular place and time and the circumstances of the production, exhibition, and use of images’.30 According to the Official Catalogue, Moore also exhibited ‘six water-colour drawings and six steel engravings of New Zealand subjects’, as well as ‘four native mats or garments. One greenstone Mari or chief’s club. Three specimens of greenstone. One carved box. One war-club. Native fishing net and fishing hooks.’ These objects were displayed as ‘curios’ rather than as artistic or cultural objects. The inclusion of an exhibit described as ‘native knives, formerly used for cannibal purposes’ reinforced the idea of a once savage people now civilized enough to accommodate investment and immigration.31 There were also two bottles of insects, ‘specimens of native grasses’, and a large map of New Zealand.32 The attraction of suitable settlers was a primary objective of the organizers of the New Zealand exhibit, and of many of the exhibitors themselves. With the exception of Balneavis, the New Ulster exhibitors signed a memorandum, endorsed by Grey, requesting that ‘the several articles contributed by us may be sold in England for the best prices that can be obtained, and the proceeds expended in paying one-fourth part of the steerage passage of labourers desirous of emigrating to this place, an agreement, if possible, being entered into with the intended emigrants that they will settle within a distance of twenty miles of Auckland, for two years from their arrival in the colony.’33 At about the same time as the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, the colony of New Zealand was represented nearby in S. C. Brees’s Colonial Panorama at the Linwood Gallery, Leicester Square. In three performances each day, audiences witnessed a performance that, according to an advertising handbill, incorporated the geographical highlights of the colony: ‘Nelson, Otago, Teranaki [sic], Wellington, Canterbury, Auckland, Hokianga, the Bay of Islands’. Included on the handbill was an illustration of an idealized colonist in friendly embrace with a Maori warrior. According to the Morning Post, the panoramic show was ‘the best thing of the kind that has yet been exhibited’, ‘an imaginative construct, a composite work, with figures, motifs, elements from a variety of sources – visual and verbal’ (p. 66). 30 Ibid., p. 67. 31 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, p. 1002. 32 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 183. 33 Governor Sir George Grey to Earl Grey, 28 October 1850, ‘Further Papers’, 7 August 1851, p. 70.

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while The Times claimed that it ‘will do more to promote emigration than a thousand speeches and resolutions.’34 The motivation behind this performance went beyond exotic entertainment for profit. Brees had been principal engineer and surveyor to Wakefield’s controversial New Zealand Company, and the Colonial Panorama was likewise intended to encourage emigration and investment. As the show came to the end of its season, an advertisement in The Times announced that he was to return to New Zealand and ‘wishes to be joined by some gentlemen with capital. £1,000 would go as far as £10,000 under his management; £5,000 would be ample. Consignments and agencies undertaken, and land selected. From Mr. Brees’s well-known character and knowledge of the subject, this is an opportunity rarely occurring. There would be no risk whatsoever.’35 While the message found in Brees’s Colonial Panorama was perhaps more explicitly conveyed than in the colony’s display at the Crystal Palace, the use of exhibits such as the reproduction of Gilfillan’s painting together with the more prosaic specimens of raw and manufactured colonial produce suggests that these two projected visions of New Zealand – one more official or formal than the other – perhaps shared more than they did not, particularly in terms of their intent. Also listed in both the Reports by the Juries and the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition were a series of items identified as being exhibited by ‘Tao Nui, a New Zealand Chief’, who was probably the Nga Puhi leader Aperahama Taonui.36 These exhibits included samples of ‘New Zealand tanning barks’, specimens ‘showing the native manufacture of New Zealand flax … deemed worthy of Honourable Mention’, and ‘a valuable little collection of the woods of New Zealand’, which was awarded a Prize Medal.37 These items were exhibited on behalf of Taonui by an agent, E. Gillman of Twickenham, and as such they were displayed not in the New Zealand section, but rather among the British exhibits.38 It is significant that while exhibits manufactured and owned by Maori were displayed by Pakeha within the New Zealand section, Taonui was able, through the intervention of an agent, to be named as an exhibitor in the more general display of British produce and manufactures. 34 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap, 1978), p. 426. In 1838, a panoramic ‘View of the Bay of Islands’ was displayed in Robert Burford’s Panorama in Leicester Square. The panorama, which was later exhibited in New York, was reconstructed from drawings made by Augustus Earle in 1827. See Robert Burford, Description of a View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, Now Exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square, Painted by the Proprietor, Robert Burford, from Drawings taken by Augustus Earle, Esq. (London, 1838); Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 62–3. 35 The Times, 20 May 1851, cited in Altick, pp. 426–7. 36 Henare, p. 150; Judith Binney, ‘Taonui, Aperahama’, in Claudia Orange (ed.), The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume Two 1870–1900 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books; Department of Internal Affairs, 1993), pp. 500–502. 37 Royal Commission, Reports by the Juries, pp. 93, 101, 149. 38 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, p. 27.

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New Zealand was not the only Pacific representative at the Crystal Palace Exhibition. The Australian colonies were also represented, as was Tahiti or the ‘Society Islands’ as it was known.39 But the spotlight at the 1851 Exhibition and at the exhibitions that followed was firmly fixed on the display and projection of nations (to which colonial exhibits contributed), particularly the host nation, or, in the case of later exhibitions of empire, on the larger, better known and economically important colonies, such as India. Even with the colonial development of New Zealand and the other Australasian colonies, the Pacific, while present in many forms at many exhibitions, was never really conspicuous. Nevertheless, a survey of the display of ‘native’ crafts and ‘curios’, of raw and manufactured materials, of the various settler societies and their productions and ‘progress’, and even the display of indigenous peoples at these events, can provide insights into the different forms and processes of colonization, the attitudes of colonists to the places that they were making their own, and the attitudes towards – and place of – colonized peoples within settler societies. Often the only way to see the Pacific through the literature generated by the exhibitions is to read between the lines. At the 1851 Exhibition, for example, the attitude of one commentator to the quality of the ‘craftsmanship’ of the ‘South Seas’ can be detected in the comparison he makes with the exhibits of India. ‘Nearly everything in that collection which is the work of man’s hand’, he says of the Indian display, ‘indicates a vast expenditure of time for its production and a great display of taste. Yet it is nearly all ornamental rather than useful in its character. Whenever the really useful arts appear rudeness of material and design are visible. A warlike weapon will be finished off in the most elaborate style, yet a pair of scissors be manufactured in a manner worthy of the South Sea Islanders.’40 One of the colour engravings published in Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, under the title ‘Colonial Produce’, depicts a section of the colonial exhibits, including those of New Zealand, housed to the west of the south entrance to the building.41 The image shows a range of primary produce from specimens of South Australian copper ore to a collection of wax models of tropical flowers, vegetable products and fruit from the West Indies. To the rear of the engraving can be seen a glimpse of the New Zealand exhibit, situated between those of Western Australia and Van Dieman’s Land on one side and that of Canada, with a prominent craving of an ‘Indian chief’, on the other. All that can be seen of New Zealand’s display is a cluster of indistinguishable objects and paintings on a red cloth-covered 39 Ibid., p. 302. Included were four exhibits of ‘native manufactures’ contributed by ‘Her Majesty Pomare, Queen of the Society Isles’. 40 Illustrated Exhibitor, 18, 4 October 1851, pp. 318–19, cited in Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Theatres of Memory, Volume II, ed. Alison Light (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 78. 41 Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, from the originals painted for HRH Prince Albert by Messrs Nash, Hague, and Roberts, R.A. (London, 1852), n.p. [‘Colonial Produce’].

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display table or counter. Above the table is suspended a model waka (Maori canoe). The only mention of New Zealand in the text accompanying this illustration is a note that ‘It was close to this spot that originated, on May 8th, the only fire which occurred during the whole time the Exhibition was open to the public.’ The fire was caused by the over-heating of a draft-pipe attached to a gas stove in an adjacent office, ‘which ignited some papers in a box under the counter on which were displayed the New Zealand productions; it was instantly discovered and extinguished.’ Almost prophetically, the account claims that thus was ‘averted a calamity which, by its effects, probably would have ranked with the most deplorable of the disasters of any age of the world.’42 In 1850, one of Governor Grey’s staff had noted that ‘in this colony we have to complain of the short time allowed us to collect specimens for the Exhibition’.43 Nevertheless, when on 7 May 1851 Queen Victoria paid an official visit to the colonial exhibits, she described in her journal the New Zealand and South Australian exhibits as consisting ‘chiefly of raw products – but very valuable ones, such as beautiful specimens of wood etc.’44 Eleven years later, at London’s Great Exhibition of 1862, New Zealand was ostensibly in a better position to construct a more encyclopaedic exhibit of its resources. By this time gold and wool had become the colony’s most prominent exhibits, reflecting the development of these industries since the 1851 Exhibition. ‘The gold from Otago’, it was reported in the Handbook to the Industrial Department, ‘is the most prominent object.’45 Timber and coal continued to be exhibited, and these were joined by agricultural produce. Regarding the ‘progress’ made in the colony since the 1851 Exhibition, it was further noted that ‘Canterbury and several other new settlements have been founded, and many new provinces created’, but exhibits from Auckland continued to dominated New Zealand’s representation, with 78 exhibits from that province, 20 from Nelson, 14 from Wellington, and just one (the display of gold) from Otago.46 The surveyor and artist Charles Heaphy again exhibited a number of descriptive works of art, this time concentrating more on the geothermal ‘wonders’ that were to become increasingly important in New Zealand’s displays. These were accompanied by written descriptions of the scenes. In one piece on ‘the Tarata Boiling Springs, Rota Mahana, New Zealand’, Heaphy mentioned almost in passing the presence of Maori in this exotic unworldly location: ‘From a tepid temperature at the base of the hill,’ he wrote, ‘the water becomes gradually warmer on ascending, and the natives choose the most agreeable bath, and remain in it for hours at a time’. Maori were thus ‘naturally’ incorporated into the wondrous landscape. Heaphy also contributed a copy of 42 Ibid., n.p. [‘West Indies’]. 43 Governor Sir George Grey to Earl Grey, 28 October 1850, ‘Further Papers’, 7 August 1851, p. 65. 44 C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: HMSO, 1981), p. 18. 45 Robert Hunt, Handbook to the Industrial Department of the International Exhibition, 1862 (London: E. Stanford, 1862), cited in Knight, p. 9. 46 Knight, pp. 6, 9–10.

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his geological map of the Auckland province, while the geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s map of Nelson was also displayed. Both maps were awarded medals.47 There were also ‘plentiful’ photographic and panoramic views of scenery. A Mrs Fox contributed ‘drawings of New Zealand flora’, which were awarded an honourable mention, as were J. N. Crombie’s photographic ‘views of the colony’.48 Of the conflict occurring in New Zealand at this time, there is barely a passing mention. ‘The various settlements in these interesting islands’, it was noted, ‘have made a remarkable progress within the last few years, notwithstanding the pressure of certain adverse circumstances’. Overall, New Zealand appears to have done reasonably well at the 1862 Exhibition, with the colony’s 113 exhibitors collecting 33 medals and 10 honourable mentions. It was also noted that ‘the Australasian colonies occupied more than one and a half times the space allotted to all the other British colonies (with the exception of India) put together’.49 New Zealand’s early representations at international exhibitions (both in London and elsewhere) were not the result of an organized strategy of display. The government of the colony was generally only one of a number of exhibitors with seemingly little control over the quality and nature of the display as a whole. It was not until the 1873 Vienna International Exposition, or Weltausstellung, that serious thought was given to the images that New Zealand should be conveying to an international audience. Sir Isaac Featherston, New Zealand’s first Agent-General in London, in consultation with the Colonial Secretary’s Office, was responsible for organizing the colony’s display at Vienna. ‘The value to New Zealand of such an advertisement cannot’, he claimed, ‘be overrated. The Colony has never yet had an opportunity of adequately exhibiting its natural and industrial resources; and I would therefore press upon the Government the importance of seizing the present one.’50 From the beginning, it was decided that New Zealand should be exhibited independently of the Australian colonies at Vienna, in order to attract investment and immigration that might otherwise have gone elsewhere. While Featherston and Sir Charles Clifford, a former speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, were appointed as New Zealand’s Commissioners to the Exhibition, it was to be New Zealand’s foremost ‘men of science’, notably Julius Haast and James Hector, who actually planned and constructed the exhibit.51 A preliminary exhibition was held in Christchurch, from which the best exhibits in each class were selected for international exposure. As with the earlier exhibitions, the majority of these exhibits were specimens of natural resources and primary 47 Ibid., pp. 42–4. 48 Ibid., pp. 54, 82. 49 Ibid., pp. 10, 41, 91. 50 I. E. Featherston to William Gisborne, Colonial Secretary, London, 27 June 1872, ‘The Vienna Exhibition, (Papers Relating To)’, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives of New Zealand, 1873, H-5, No. 1, p. 1. 51 Clifford was also a leading New Zealand land-owner. H. A. L. Laing and Kenneth A. Simpson, ‘Clifford Charles 1813–1893’, DNZB, vol. 1, pp. 85–6.

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produce, but at Vienna different techniques of display were applied to enhance the impact of the colony’s exhibit. At the centre of the New Zealand court was a group of articulated Moa skeletons, discovered and exhibited by Haast. Recently created geological maps became exhibits in themselves and the cartographic ‘invention’ of New Zealand was now used in the re-invention, or re-presentation, of the country. The unique aspects of the natural environment were thus invoked, alongside Maori artistic and cultural objects, to create a distinctive New Zealand identity. At the Crystal Palace in 1851 and at the exhibitions that followed, New Zealand, the Australasian colonies, and the Pacific generally, were incorporated – in conception if not fully in reality – into the existing structures and order of imperialism. ‘The Australasian colonies’, intoned a contemporary review of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, ‘include New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, to which may be added Fiji and New Guinea, a wonderful group occupying the whole of the great sub-continent of Australia, with the adjoining islands of Tasmania on the south, Melville and other small islands on the north, New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand in the adjoining seas.’ It was further stated that: Here then we possess an empire of no mean size, containing within itself all the necessary elements of wealth, power and stability, but united to the mother country even more than any of the other colonies of Great Britain by the ties of blood; for whereas in India the foreign element far outweighs the European, and in Canada the French, Germans, and Indians almost balance the British in numbers, in the Australasian colonies, except in New Guinea and Fiji, the population is almost wholly of British descent, and the rapid progress made by these Antipodean lands speaks volumes of the Anglo-Saxon race, and its power of seizing every coign of vantage, and developing it into something great and profitable, spite of difficulties and dangers.52

The representations of this Antipodean ‘empire of no mean size’ at British imperial exhibitions changed as the empire changed. New Zealand, for example, as it ‘progressed’ from colony to dominion, and towards nationhood, sought to reinvent itself and its relationship to the empire as well as towards its more immediate environment. The place of the natural world and of Maori people and culture in these changing representations is of especial interest, particularly as tourism became an increasingly influential aim of the exhibition organizers. While the participation of the French Pacific at French expositions universelles, and particularly at expositions coloniales, in many ways parallels the display of Britain’s Pacific colonies in London, there were some differences, notably the display of people from New Caledonia and elsewhere at French exhibitions as late as 1931. Similarly, the display of various Pacific Island cultures and peoples at American world’s fairs in the late 52 ‘The Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, Westminster Review, 70/1 (July 1886), pp. 29–59, at p. 40.

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected growing American interest and imperial aspirations in the Pacific. Exhibitions held within the Pacific itself – in Sydney, Melbourne, Christchurch, Dunedin and elsewhere – likewise incorporated imperial re-presentations of the Antipodean settler societies – and the wider Pacific – for their own consumption. As the international exhibition phenomenon spread, the Pacific colonies became increasingly conscious not only of how they exhibited themselves at the level of the metropole, but also of how they represented themselves to each other and, indeed, to themselves. In 1911 New Zealand was again exhibited at the Crystal Palace, this time in Sydenham for the Festival of Empire Exhibition celebrating the coronation of George V. Here, the ‘All-red Tour’ took visitors on a train journey through the Empire, reconstructed in 250 acres of parkland. Each colony was represented in its own iconic manner. New Zealand, viewed from the windows of this imperial train, was a place of ‘hot water geysers, a “quaint Maori village”, and much wool and mutton’.53 According to Paul Greenhalgh, the ‘Maori Village’ was ‘by far the most popular and unusual attraction’ of the Exhibition. Visitors were informed that The Maoris are a most interesting race, they being the original inhabitants of New Zealand where they arrived from the island of Hawaiki, in the Pacific, more than seven hundred years ago.54 Since the occupation of New Zealand by Great Britain in 1814, there have been many Maori outbreaks, the most serious of which started in 1868, under a chief named Te Kooti, and was not finally quelled until 1875. There have been minor insurrections since, but the Maoris are now a most peaceful race, and among the most loyal subjects of King George. Their population has diminished since 1846, when they numbered 100,000, to about 45,000, but is now stationary.55

Of the Maori who inhabited the recreated village in Sydenham, the Official Daily Programme reported that ‘the party consists of fifty warriors and maidens of the Arawa tribe [and] includes Mita Taupopoki, the veteran chief who fought for the British against Te Kooti in 1873.’56 The ‘Maori village’ was depicted in The Sphere as a conglomeration of structures and carvings arranged in front of a painted backdrop. The railway lines of the ‘All-red Tour’ can be clearly seen passing in front of this reconstruction of ‘reality’. Also shown on this tour were dioramas of the loading of wool and other produce at 53 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 106. 54 While the Percy Smith reconstruction of Maori origins is now discredited, its place in this sort of rhetoric has left its residue in the contemporary popular imagination. See K. R. Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands (Auckland: Penguin, 2003). 55 Official Daily Programme, Coronation Exhibition (London: Bembrose and Son, 1911), cited in Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 93–4. 56 Ibid.

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a New Zealand port, while the dominion’s parliament was represented among other scale replicas of government buildings from throughout the empire.57 This was a very different New Zealand on display to that exhibited at the 1851 Exhibition. In 1901, the New Zealand government had created a Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, the first such government agency in the world. The department played an integral role in exhibiting New Zealand to an international audience at international exhibitions, and was also responsible for the establishment, administration and promotion of the country’s tourism infrastructure. The invention of New Zealand as a pre-eminent site of natural ‘wonder’ and the related representation of Maori as the inhabitants of this natural world were to become significant factors in the promotion of tourism, an increasingly important objective of New Zealand exhibition displays in the early twentieth century. This spectacular backdrop also served as something of a yardstick for the self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ settler society. While the ‘valuable and tolerably extensive collection of native and other products’ exhibited in 1851 had been brought together with little obvious thought to an organized representation of the colony, the collective display did draw on existing modes of representation of the South Seas, and to a large extent created a precedent for New Zealand participation at British and other international exhibitions through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

57 The Sphere, supplement, 13 May 1911. A ‘Pageant of London and Empire’ was also held in conjunction with the Exhibition.

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Chapter 5

‘Nothing Very New or Very Showy to Exhibit’?: Australia at the Great Exhibition and After Peter H. Hoffenberg

The Great Exhibition’s commissioners called upon East and West, Old and New to participate in their grand spectacle in London in 1851. Among many others, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) answered that invitation as ‘The British Possessions in Australasia’.1 Their displays of varying sizes were arranged along the Main Avenue of Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace amid the vast and comprehensive ‘British end of the Exhibition’, in the words of Horace Greeley, the visiting American newspaperman.2 Here were ‘far more’ exhibits than in all of the rest of the building put together, and the ‘Colonial Contributions’ among them did not escape the prominent American’s gaze or pen during his tours of Joseph Paxton’s controversial Palace. The ‘fine Wood’ from various Australasian locales and the ‘[m]anufactured textile fabrics from Sydney’ caught Greeley’s attention amidst the ‘not vast but comprehensive’ British colonial display. They earned passing praise in his travel memoirs, as the editor and publisher was hardly effusive with that praise about the Australian exhibits. He lumped together ‘the Chinese, Australian, Egyptian and Mexican contributions’, remarking that they were ‘quite interesting, but … suggest little or nothing, unless it be the stolidity of their contrivers.’3 This final verdict mirrored the general consensus about Australia’s displays. Public sentiment was hardly favourable at the time: whereas Canada and India impressed, Australasia disappointed.

1 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, Volume II, Section IV: Fine Arts, Class 30 and Colonies (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1851), pp. 176–84, and Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, 3rd edn (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1851), pp. 176–83. 2 Horace Greeley, Glances at Europe: In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, etc. during the Summer of 1851. Including Notices of the Great Exhibition, or World’s Fair (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1851), pp. 30–31. 3 Ibid., p. 34.

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That opinion was shared by a variety of visitors and chroniclers, elite and common, Australian and foreign.4 ‘With regard to wealth and splendour … those [exhibits] of the East India Company far surpass all the rest’, concluded one London observer, a few lines before he disparaged New South Wales for sending ‘a smaller collection than we should have expected.’5 The same author praised Canada for exhibiting ‘a very interesting collection of articles.’6 Australians themselves were often frustrated, if not embarrassed. This is not to say that all of their displays were condemned or ignored, but that praise for printed volumes, wool and minerals sharply contrasted with the general disdain for colonial courts that were considered small and uninspiring. Looking back, one chronicler of the 1862 London International Exhibition reminded his readers that Australia’s contributions to the earlier Great Exhibition amounted to ‘a few ores and cereals, a block of timber here and there, and a case or two of wools.’7 This was an exaggeration, but only a slight one in the estimation of most visitors in 1851. Among those was John Tallis, who chronicled that the Australian colonies ‘had nothing very new or very showy to exhibit’ at the Crystal Palace.8 Many contemporaries found Australia’s poor showing rather ironic. After all, those colonies were increasingly important to Victorian Britain’s political economy, global power, national identity and social order. Considerable 4 See for example, ‘Canada and Australia’, A Visit to the Great Exhibition, 1851, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 400.A.16, pp. 9–10; ‘Colonial Contributions to the Great Exhibition’, The Colonial Magazine and East India Review, 21 (1851), pp. 521–4; J. F. Royle, ‘Lecture XI. The Arts and Manufactures of India by Professor J.F. Royle, M.D., F.R.S.’, in Lectures on the Progress of Arts and Science, Resulting from the Great Exhibition in London, Delivered Before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Suggestion of H.R.H. Prince Albert (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1854), pp. 331–401 and Reminiscences of the Crystal Palace, 1852, National Art Library, 400.A.114. The Australian exhibits are discussed in Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 100–101; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), esp. pp. 53–7; Andrew Hassam, ‘Portable Iron Structures and Uncertain Colonial Spaces at the Sydenham Crystal Palace’, in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 174–93, and Jonathan Sweet, The Face of Australia: Colonial Design and Representation at International Exhibitions, 1851–1888, unpublished MA thesis in The History of Design, Victoria and Albert Museum/ Royal College of Art, 1991, esp. pp. 1–5 and 24–5. 5 ‘Colonial Contributions’, pp. 521 and 524. 6 Ibid., p. 522. 7 John Timbs, The Industry, Science, & Art of the Age: or, The International Exhibition of 1862 Popularly Described from its Origins to its Close (London: Lockwood & Co., 1863), p. 269. 8 Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London: The London Printing and Publishing Company, 1852), vol. 1, p. 53.

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public attention, admittedly not all of it favourable, was being paid back home in England to such ‘possessions’ in the press and literature. News items and fictional stories covered an array of Australian topics, such as the end of convict transportation, Aboriginal–white relations, the establishment of new colonies (South Australia in 1836 and Victoria in 1851) and ‘responsible government’, and the discovery of gold on the eve of the Great Exhibition. Tallis noted that although they showed nothing ‘very new or very showy’, the Australian colonies were, after all, ‘important … possessions’ as producers of raw materials, consumers of English goods, and ‘great fields for emigration’. But, which visitors among the millions could be expected to find Australia’s wool and tinned meat samples ‘picturesque’ or ‘interesting’, characteristics of other exhibits to which visitors gravitated?9 Tallis wrote that there appeared to be ‘real interest’ in bound volumes and lithographs from Hobart and Sydney, but those were hardly the exhibits upon which dreams and fortunes rested.10 Australians and others offered several reasons at the time and shortly afterwards for the weak Australian showing: the undertaking was hurried and poorly organized; the internal and external distances were too great; potential exhibitors faced shipping delays to England; and the Australians were ill prepared for and perhaps even indifferent (if not ‘apathetic’) to this novel enterprise.11 Newspaper editors in Sydney boldly charged their community with a prevailing ‘inertia’ about the event as late as the last week in October 1850.12 On a practical note, important official notices for the event arrived late. Readers of the local Melbourne daily read the official announcement of the Exhibition, which included the invitation to participate and the listing of the four primary exhibit categories, during the last week of September 1850, only a short time before such displays had to be collected, evaluated and shipped if they were to arrive in time to take advantage of the special customs exemptions offered by the English commissioners and for the official opening on 1 May 1851.13 Readers of the Sydney Morning Herald were informed about the Great Exhibition earlier in the year, but their slight headstart proved of very little assistance.14 Published circulars and supplements from the Government Gazette listed the categories and types of exhibits which would be most welcome, but 9 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 54. 10 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 234. 11 Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 1850, p. 2 and 11 February 1851, p. 3, and John G. Knight (compiler), The Australian Colonies at the International Exhibition, London, 1862. Extracts from the Reports of the Jurors and Other Information taken from Official Sources (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1865), p. 1. The Herald’s editors found ‘such apathy on such an occasion … unaccountable’ (13 December 1850, p. 2). 12 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1850, p. 2. 13 For example, see The Argus, 27 September 1850, p. 4 and 30 September 1850, p. 3. In contrast, public solicitations for Indian exhibits began as early as 22 February 1850. See Royle, p. 346. 14 Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1850, p. 2.

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provided no essential information about their display.15 Local organizers in Sydney were still waiting for the commissioners’ important circulars advising potential participants about the distribution and size of exhibition space in the Crystal Palace less than two months before the last date upon which vessels could leave the colony with displays and still reach London in time.16 That might help explain at least some of the alleged ‘inertia’ and ‘apathy’ in the face of those earlier announcements. Issues of space were vital to colonists facing daunting collection and shipping expenses; not surprisingly, they were reluctant to ship items for which there might be inadequate and/or poorly positioned display space. Initial preparations were eventually undertaken in Sydney by the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society, whose members advertised the upcoming Exhibition and prepared displays for evaluation and forwarding.17 A special subcommittee of the Society was established to oversee preparations; that group was the first Australian exhibition commission, although its membership was limited to the Society’s members.18 It mirrored to some degree the efforts of the Royal Society of Arts back in England, one of the most influential supporters of the Great Exhibition. Much of the colonial attention concerning Australian participation at the Great Exhibition, whether supporting, opposing, or both, focused on the Society’s subcommittee. That was the case for Australians in Sydney, for example, as well as those abroad in Britain, for two reasons. The Society appeared to be the only organized body in New South Wales doing something for the Crystal Palace, and it comprised some rather influential and controversial local political, commercial and pastoral leaders. Among such members were Charles Nicholson, William and James Macarthur, and Alfred Stephen, as well as local scientists, such as Charles Moore and the Rev. W. B. Clarke. In an unexpected way, one might even argue that in light of its own political and social context, the Society and its subcommittee might have been able to wield more power in the colonial context concerning the Great Exhibition than its complements back home, notably the Society of Arts. That is no small claim, as the Society of Arts was at the heart of the Great Exhibition, and its leadership and membership, including Henry Cole and Prince Albert, advocated the show from positions of considerable authority. At the same time, though, it faced opposition from figures and groups who also wielded considerable authority, whereas the colonial Society’s most formidable foe was local indifference or apathy, not a well-organized and articulate opposition. Colonial elites in Sydney pressing for participation at the London show did so without the explicit and tangible association with Prince Albert – and without the explicit and tangible opposition to the Prince Consort – but also 15 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1850, p. 3. 16 Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 1850, p. 2. 17 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 March 1850, p. 2. 18 Second Annual Report of the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society (Sydney: J. T. Grocot, 1850), esp. pp. 6 and 22–5.

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without the explicit and tangible opposition of major parliamentary and business individuals and groups. Those were not bashful back in Britain about expressing opposition to the proposed and, by 1850, seemingly inevitable Great Exhibition. What was the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society and its exhibition subcommittee doing and not doing in light of English and local calls for participation at the Great Exhibition? What were the Australian responses to those calls as 1850 turned into 1851? The Society’s members generally agreed for both public and personal reasons that the ‘Grand Industrial Exhibition’ offered an unprecedented opportunity to publicize and advertise ‘the productions of Australia’. What were those ‘productions’ in the middle of the century? Wines, dried fruits, silk, leather goods, dyed wools, tobacco and other ‘articles of commerce’ which were in, admittedly, different stages of production and displayed varying degrees of success. That being said, the members were well aware that there was little if any general public interest in the Exhibition in New South Wales or even Sydney, and that ‘the reception of the subject [participating at the Exhibition] has … been far from encouraging.’ The response to the convergence of Society interest and society apathy? Not surprisingly, in true Victorian fashion, the creation of the special sub-committee, chaired by Nicholson, with the charge of finding ‘the best means of forwarding the products of this colony to the Industrial Exhibition.’ Prominent members of that subcommittee included Clarke and Moore, as well as T. S. Mort, T. L. Mitchell and George Bennett, all well known and influential in the colony; some enjoyed a reputation in Britain as well. The subcommittee faced the unenviable task of trying to convince the general public that the Great Exhibition offered a ‘great’ and ‘unprecedented’ advantage which, quite clearly, other colonies and nations would take advantage of and, therefore, leave New South Wales even further behind in the economic race. What might be emphasized? Both the variety and the capabilities, or potential uses, of the colony’s products, as much, if not more, than their quality. Committed to the free trade principles embraced by the event’s organizers, the local New South Wales advocates suggested that their goods would benefit by the direct ‘competition and Comparison’ with other nations’ products in the Crystal Palace. Agreeing with the fundamental principles of the show, the subcommittee then set out to establish a scheme to ensure that the competitive type and amount of goods would find their way to London from the great distance of New South Wales. Their practical steps established a precedent for future overseas exhibition activities in intent, if not always in realization, even for Australians from non-free trade colonies, such as their protectionist new neighbour, Victoria. Since the Great Exhibition was far away and few, if any, of the Society’s members, including its leaders, intended to attend the event, the colony needed a ‘trustworthy agent’ in London to receive, catalogue, arrange and dispose of exhibits; and, finally, send back after the show reports and prizes. Rather than relying on others to do so, the subcommittee’s members sought to somehow appoint from Sydney this individual, using, if possible, the assistance of

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Australians living in London. This arrangement was not the same as having an Australian exhibition committee comprising at least a handful of visiting Australians, but it was, perhaps, a recognition of the need for such a body. A few years later, those committees would be created as official commissions and become an expected part of the Australian exhibition experience. Such a commission was not formed by or for New South Wales or the other Australasian colonies at the Great Exhibition. The subcommittee’s members also realized the practical problem of finances. Monies were necessary to advertise, organize, ship and arrange the goods. Not everyone in the colonies would volunteer their goods and provide assistance for the transportation of such goods to London. It was agreed that the limited funds should be devoted to goods which it was ‘important to send home’ and which would not be offered by the exhibitors gratuitously, as some others might be. What was ‘important’ to send to London were exhibits solicited by English commissioners, those considered by the Society to be ‘of paramount importance in a commercial, agricultural, and pastoral point of view’, and others identified as elevating the mind, refining taste, and generally improving the happiness and welfare of the colonists. The latter class of ‘important’ exhibits might include books about colonial subjects, printed in the colonies, and ornamented with colonial materials and motifs. Finally, the subcommittee recognized its own ‘tyranny of distance’ by requesting exhibits large enough to display and gain notice, but not ‘of such bulk as to be unnecessarily cumbersome.’19 Distance made some Australian exhibits exotic; distance made all of them expensive to ship. The Society’s call for a London agent was only one of several developments that we could look back upon in retrospect and see as precedents for later exhibition ideas and actions. The understanding that Australian exhibits might celebrate variety and quantity, rather than quality, would be a credo embraced by future colonial exhibitors and commissioners uncertain about just how good their products were, but quite confident about their size and diversity. Although not realized, the subcommittee’s desire for a preliminary local public exhibition of goods to be forwarded to the Crystal Palace was a second precedent, this one for the many subsequent Australian exhibitions held in Sydney and Melbourne, among other cities, as preliminaries to overseas shows in London, Paris and Philadelphia. The Sydney Morning Herald endorsed the colonial government’s ‘readiness to place a portion of the Sydney Government Domain at the service of the Committee for such exhibition’ before the goods were to be shipped to London.20 Its editors would later endorse preliminary local exhibitions, such as the one in Sydney held in 1854 as a showcase for goods to be sent to the Universal Exhibition scheduled to open in Paris the following year.

19 That phrase is from Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). 20 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1851, p. 2.

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In 1850, the leading Sydney newspaper urged organizers and exhibitors to be ‘up and doing’ in the face of what the Society’s subcommittee proposed and made public, as well as the rapidly approaching deadline for getting goods certified as genuine and shipped to the Exhibition.21 Even so, by the end of the year, only ‘some few individuals’ in New South Wales had sent specimens to England, but ‘as a colony,’ an editorial bemoaned, ‘we have done nothing’ to fill the four thousand feet of reserved exhibition space in the Crystal Palace.22 The editors had no doubt that a golden opportunity was being wasted, an opportunity to display the products of New South Wales and compare those with the products of other colonies and nations, as well as with those representing the condition of Australia before colonization. Not only would ‘the products of the civilised and uncivilised’ be brought into one view for comparison, but also the products of New Zealand, Van Dieman’s Land and South Australia, among other exhibitors. Common questions across political borders about agriculture and livestock within a particular climate, manufacturing with certain resources and skills, and even the nature of raw materials, such as copper ore, could be asked and seemingly answered by participating in the Great Exhibition. One could observe and compare Australia’s displays with complementary exhibits in other colonial and national courts. It was undoubtedly important to colonists in New South Wales to contrast with their own cattle, sheep, wool, tallow, meat, cloths and copper ‘the murderous weapons of the savage’, or Australian Aboriginal. It was of equal importance to draw comparisons between their own ‘numerous … articles’ and New Zealand’s wool, or South Australia’s copper. Such grand expectations were met with equally grand disappointment. By the third week in December, the Herald’s editors solemnly concluded: ‘It is … now clearly impossible for the colony to avail itself of the great opportunity which was offered to it of displaying its resources and productions to the whole civilised world.’23 As late as the second week in February 1851, editors were praising the Society’s ‘scheme’ and simultaneously bemoaning the fact that ‘no effort has been made in Sydney to send home to the great exhibition specimens of the productions and manufactures of New South Wales.’24 That was, perhaps, true in spirit, if not in fact. The exaggeration served a rhetorical and policy purpose, but it also ignored some of the concrete steps taken by some in the colony. Enterprising colonists among those ‘few individuals’ stared down the impending deadlines and embraced the ‘great’ commercial opportunities offered by collecting, forwarding and displaying colonial exhibits in London. A few cleverly positioned themselves to make money from the preparations and shipping. One local company with a representative in London advertised

21 22 23 24

Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October 1850, p. 2. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 1850, p. 2. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1850, p. 2. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1851, p. 2.

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the forwarding of ‘any articles entrusted to their care’.25 Consigned goods would be picked up and delivered by the agent in London for a fee. Individuals and companies also prepared commercial samples of some common colonial goods, such as the ‘pieces of colonial tweed, manufactured from colonial wool’, at less cost than complementary English manufactures. They were shipped too late to meet the first deadline for display, but, when eventually put on display, served to advertise not only local manufactures, but also the potential for export trade with Britain, neighbouring colonies and, in the enthusiastic vision of one commentator, perhaps even with China and India, among the ‘Asiatic countries’.26 The preparation and advertisement of such commercial goods – animal hides and wines among them – served some more limited yet significant local purposes, if not always such grand worldly aims. Published solicitations for exhibits were also read over the colonial border in Adelaide, South Australia, but not early enough to avoid similar anxiety about collecting and forwarding displays. Those announcements and responses in the neighbouring colony, established as a ‘free’colony without convicts, could not compensate for various difficulties. They did little to remedy colonial apathy and the fact that, without direct steam connections, the local Executive Commissioner for South Australia feared it could take ‘from 8 to 12 months’ for his colony’s goods to arrive in England.27 Anxious to participate in ‘the Great National Exhibition’, he faced the nearly invincible dual tyranny of time and distance: too little of the former, too much of the latter. Might the Australians have overcome such difficulties and impressed with their displays if the colonies had worked together? Most likely, but there was very little, if any, sense of intercolonial ‘Australian’ identity at this point. Visions of Australian federation and nationalism were the luxury of a handful of groups and individuals struggling to overcome the more common and compelling separatist and local impulses. Strong regional distinctions, such as that between ‘free’ and ‘convict’ colonies, dominated the political world; the social world was no more peaceful and unified. Debates about transportation and local constitutions split the settler community, as well as dividing some of its members from the English, lending the era a spirit of regionalism and localism, rather than a wider Australian nationalism. What did the Royal Society of Tasmania and the West Australia Colonization Assurance Corporation have in common in 1851? Not much, although both were busy organizing exhibits for separate colonial courts at the Crystal Palace.

25 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 1850, p. 1. Bogue and Co. of Pitt Street, Sydney paid for the following notice: ‘Industrial Exhibition of All Nations. The Undersigned, who are sending home specimens of Australian produce for this Exhibition, will be happy to forward any articles entrusted to their care, consigned to Mr. Adam Bogue, now in London.’ 26 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1850, p. 2. 27 Samuel Davenport to Secretary, Royal Society of Arts, 18 April 1850, Archives of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, London, GCP 51/2a/36.

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Two other fundamental reasons for the apparently poor showing remind us that exhibitions were not islands unto themselves. Pressing local political and social questions were more important to the colonists at the time, and affected the ways in which they prepared for the Great Exhibition. The chaotic mineral rushes, the consequences of ending convict transportation, local and overseas debates about ‘responsible government’, and the formal ‘separation’ of Port Phillip (Victoria) from New South Wales drove public life in 1850 and 1851, as did the persistent contests between radical republicans and conservative pastoralists on the one hand, and free-traders and protectionists on the other.28 This was hardly a tranquil period in the political and social history of the Australian colonies, as other anxieties spilled out to make even the question of who should be in charge of soliciting, organizing and evaluating local exhibits a thorny one in the uneasy garden of the Antipodes. One reader of Sydney’s main daily newspaper was enraged that his fellow colonists ‘do not regard this great project [the Great Exhibition] with sufficient interest’, and that they were satisfied with putting its local management in the hands of ‘a private society’.29 Rather, he wrote, ‘the Government ought to stimulate’ participation with ‘official countenance’. The event was too important to be left to the Australasian Agricultural and Horticultural Society and ‘a few patriotic persons’. Hints of the political nature of such voluntary societies and the criticism they drew could also be discerned across the border in the colony of Victoria. The pro-separationist editors of The Argus in Melbourne assisted members of the new Victoria Industrial Society (that city’s complementary private society) with their exhibition labours by publishing correspondence about ‘the possibility of getting together some contributions for Port Phillip to the grand Exhibition’ apart from the other New South Wales exhibits.30 The Exhibition itself might advertise the separation of the regions and announce the arrival of Victoria, the new colony, as well as its voluntary society. Public letters included appeals for exhibits to fill the colonial courts. The local process did not go smoothly. The publication of those letters in The Argus proved contentious in its own right when Melbourne’s other newspaper, the Melbourne Herald, accused the Industrial Society and local exhibition officials of favouring The Argus.31 Attacks flew back and forth for a few days, the Herald choosing its publishing competitor and the Secretary of the Society as targets. Some criticism of exhibition activities in both colonies focused on the organizing societies and their members, a colonial reflection of similar 28 For discussion of such early- and mid-century public issues in New South Wales, please see Beverley Kingston, A History of New South Wales (New York: Cambridge University, 2006); J. M. Ward, James Macarthur, 1798–1867: Colonial Conservative (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1981); and Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835–1851 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 29 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 1850, p. 3. 30 The Argus, 15 October 1850, p. 3. 31 The Argus, 15 October 1850, p. 3.

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criticism faced by the Royal Society back in England. It, too, was a target of those who opposed and conflated the Great Exhibition, the Society, and its leadership. Australia’s apparent shortcomings can also be explained by the awkward problem of finding attractive exhibits to represent such ‘new’ colonial societies. Tallis was not alone in bemoaning the dearth of anything ‘new’ and ‘showy’ to exhibit. Even exhibition enthusiasts in Melbourne recommended ‘all parties interesting themselves [in the Great Exhibition] not to attempt too much; to avoid the fatal error of too high an ambition [for] the youngest of British colonies.’32 The English realized youth’s disadvantages, so that ‘no very great things either can or will be expected from us.’ Rather, in this case, ‘young’ Port Phillip, the newly created colony adjacent to New South Wales, should send ‘a few fleeces of good wool; a few handfuls of our best wheat; a dozen of Mr. Bear’s Victorian champagne; a cask or two of our fattest salt beef; a polished section of our red gum.’ The verdict? Aim for nothing less, nothing more. Some Australians heeded that advice; others did not. Either way, the Australian colonies were certainly not invisible at the Crystal Palace, and significant attention was paid to particular colonial exhibits. To a great degree, Australians responded to the invitation to send exhibits by forwarding for display what the English commissioners requested. Those overseas officials, including Henry Cole, the Executive Commissioner in London, were keenly interested in Australian flora and fauna; that is, unique natural history exhibits, which might also have some commercial uses. They turned to Australia for unusual animals, such as wombats and black swans, and local economic products, including wool, with only slightly less keen interest than they sought elephants, tigers, silks and dyes from British India. The Australians responded to that interest for the novel, curious and useful. For example, there was a marked curiosity about the Australian Gymea, or Gigantic Lily, from which rope was made. Samples were displayed at the Crystal Palace.33 Australian officials took it upon themselves to exhibit raw materials for which they were pursuing overseas markets in Britain and Europe, and/or which were ‘genuine’ products of the colonies. Those might include wines, wool, coal, wood, grain and beef samples, but only, as the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald advised, if they ‘will fairly stand competition, and … are of the very best quality, and got up in the very best style.’34 Recent stinging English criticisms of colonial beef and wool suggested to those editors that New South Wales should be careful to send only the highest quality samples and those about which there was a new curiosity. The Australian editors included local wines among such colonial products. The Great Exhibition provided ‘an opportunity of retrieving [the colony’s] good name’, but that required the careful selection and display of its goods. If that were the case, monies, as well as reputation, 32 The Argus, 12 October 1850, p. 3. 33 Lionel A. Gilbert, ‘Plants, Politics and Personalities in Nineteenth-Century New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 56/1 (1970), p. 18. 34 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1850, p. 2.

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would follow. After all, as one visiting American noted rather bluntly in his travel memoirs, nations exhibited for ‘a motive immediately selfish. They come to make the Crystal Palace an advertising shop for their wares.’35 Like many others, the Australians were desperate for consumers and investors, pursuing both in this ‘shop’ far away from home. Responding to those internal and external developments, South Australia, a representative case, forwarded at the last moment a collection which, although impressive in its variety, ‘almost exclusively belong[ed] to the class of “Raw Materials”,’ admitted Samuel Davenport, the colony’s Executive Commissioner.36 The twenty-five packages shipped from Adelaide in late November 1850 contained samples of minerals, wheat, woods, oats, dried native plants, soap, and olive oil.37 Copper and fibrous malachite from the famous Burra Burra Mines had already captured British attention, so to some degree they were expected exhibits, as were samples of grain and woods. The minerals were praised by one visitor as ‘the finest sort’; the Keeper of Mining Records at the Museum of Practical Geology in London found them ‘very remarkable’.38 They received further praise as ‘very rich specimens’ in Sir Henry T. De La Beche’s public lecture after the Exhibition’s official closing.39 The smaller specimens of gold in the ores showed more promise than performance, riding the wave of what Thomas de Quincey called ‘the gold-digging mania’ in and about California and the Australian colonies.40 Australian mineral exhibits were expected at the Great Exhibition. The unexpected Australian exhibits included statistical, scientific and literary publications. Among these were schoolbooks ‘written, printed and published in Sydney’ and the ‘Tasmanian Journal, three volumes, printed and published in Van Diemen’s Land’.41 Local maps and guidebooks also informed visitors that the colonies, including Davenport’s South Australia, were ‘eminently adapted for the growth of grain’ and other commercial products necessary for emigrants, trade and investment, and that they had a cultural and intellectual

35 William A. Drew, Glimpses and Gatherings, During a Voyage and Visit to London and the Great Exhibition, in the Summer of 1851 (Augusta, ME: Homan & Manley, 1852), p. 324. 36 Samuel Davenport to Sir Henry Young, Letter A (1850), Public Record Office of South Australia, Adelaide, GRG 24/1. 37 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 3rd edn, p. 176. 38 ‘Canada and Australia’, A Visit to the Great Exhibition, and Robert Hunt, Esq., ‘The Science of the Exhibition’, p. 10, The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of Nations, 1851 (London: George Virtue, 1851), p. IV. 39 ‘Lecture II. Mining, Quarrying, and Metallurgical Processes and Products by Sir Henry T. De La Beche, C.B., F.R.S.’, Lectures on the Progress of Arts and Science, p. 39. 40 Thomas de Quincey, ‘California and the Gold Mania’, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, Volume 10: Politics and Political Economy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1877), pp. 304–46. 41 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 3rd edn, pp. 177 and 181.

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pulse. Australasia was not only a series of philistine frontier and mercantile mining communities. Exhibition courts showed that its cities and towns boasted agricultural, botanic and mineralogical societies, industrial associations and schools, museums, libraries, art galleries, and mechanics’ institutes mirroring those found in the British Isles and on the European continent. Most, if not nearly all, of those organizations and institutions participated in the Exhibition in one way or another, such as soliciting funds from members and local governments, and collecting exhibits. The Exhibition both advertised and strengthened such elements of the growing Australian civil society and public life. That was the case in Van Diemen’s Land, where the local Royal Society of Arts of Tasmania organized and forwarded exhibits.43 Its leading members lobbied for public monies and collected private donations from colleagues to ‘prepare, arrange, and ship’ the official Tasmanian displays (including wool samples and drawings of local plants) for the Crystal Palace. Sir William Denison, the Governor, actively lobbied and assisted in other ways the collection and forwarding of the colony’s exhibits. The result? In the estimation of one visitor, ‘Van Diemen’s Land sends by far the most complete and valuable collection’ among the Australian colonies.44 Davenport and his Local Committee in South Australia understood that such voluntary societies were particularly important for a British colony relying on free, rather than transported, emigrants, and one that was, in the Executive Commissioner’s own words, ‘so remote’.45 In this case, ‘remote’ meant intellectual, cultural and social distance, as well as the more commonly understood physical distance. The participation of scientific, literary and commercial societies and their exhibition displays provided the opportunity for his colony to bridge that distance, or at least be seen making the effort to, and thus gaining the ‘acquaintance’, if not the acceptance, of the British public. The final touch? A memo from the Victoria Mining Company describing its ‘discovery’ of mesmerizing gold in the colony while sinking shafts for copper. Its author suggested the promise of great future wealth.46 South Australia’s efforts were well rewarded. Exhibition books, medals and jury reports were

42 Davenport to Young, Letter A (1850). 43 Report of the Royal Society of Tasmania for 1850 (Hobart Town: James Barnard, Government Printer, 1851), pp. 18–19, and Report of the Royal Society of Tasmania for 1856 (Hobart: H. and C. Best, Printers, 1857), pp. 31–4. 44 ‘Colonial Contributions, p. 523. The author was impressed with the arrangement of Van Diemen’s Land’s exhibits, including tables, grain, leather, wool and books. The books were printed and published in the colony. Those colonial displays were contrasted with ones from New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, whose exhibits were considered ‘small’ and often less attractive and impressive than the author would have expected. 45 Davenport to Secretary, Royal Society of Arts, 18 April 1850. 46 Letters and Communications Received by Colonial Secretary, Governor and Other Government Officials, 1836–1851, Public Record Office of South Australia, GRG 24/1.

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47

shipped back to Adelaide the following year. Among the medals was the one Davenport earned. Official praise focused on the raw materials in South Australia’s court, as it would for similar Australasian exhibits over the next fifty years. This was not surprising to either the Australians or overseas exhibition visitors. One of Davenport’s successors from New South Wales admitted in 1871 that ‘the resources of a new country are chiefly in the form of raw materials.’48 Those ‘materials’ did not only represent current wealth, but also future economic and social opportunities. They suggested what the Australian colonies offered and lacked in 1851 (and twenty years later), and what they promised. One visitor to the Crystal Palace noted that commercial exhibits and raw materials, such as coal and wool, imparted ‘a new impression of … colonial strength’ and revealed ‘a wonderful world of production’ at the Great Exhibition.49 Such displays represented imperial wealth, self-sufficiency and interdependence, but those were not the only meanings to contemporaries. There were early hints of local economic pride and independence, if not of colonial nationalism, during and after the show. Much of that pride rested on the back of sheep, particularly the famous Merino. Australian pastoralists were not reluctant to display and sell its and other breeds’ wool at the Crystal Palace. Among the most influential and powerful of that group were the Macarthurs, who sent ‘132 specimens’ of the famous Merino wool from their Camden estates in New South Wales.50 They were not alone. The prominent Australian Agricultural Company charged its local general superintendents with organizing wool exhibits for the Great Exhibition.51 A variety of samples were forwarded after the shearing season and displayed as ‘a product of New South Wales given without any artificial treatment.’ Individuals also joined this effort. One exhibitor from Sydney forwarded ‘a very beautiful fancy mat, the centre of which [was] made of colonial lambs-wool’ and ‘some fine specimens of colonial wool, dyed brown and black.’ His shipment included neck-ties and cuffs from lambswool.52 The most successful Australian pastoralists and pastoral companies varied their interests. The Macarthurs oversaw increasingly successful vineyards. The Australian Agricultural Company mined coal as part of its diversified economic portfolio, a development noted by both colonial and overseas observers. While considering the quality and quantity of the Company’s wool exhibits, Crystal Palace visitors could study its ‘samples of coals from the two seams at present

47 Letter 1095A (1853), Public Record Office of South Australia, GRG 24/6. 48 Catalogue of Exhibits in the New South Wales Annexe of the Exhibition, London International, 1871 (Sydney: Government Printer, 1871). 49 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, n.s. 15 (1851), p. 337. 50 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 3rd edn, p. 176. 51 Despatches to London Secretary from New South Wales, 1850-1852, 30 November 1850, Australian Agricultural Company Papers, Noel Butlin Archives Center, Australian National University, 78/1/20, fols 37–8. 52 Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1850, p. 2.

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worked’ in Newcastle, New South Wales.53 The cedar cases in which the coal was displayed were intended as exhibits in their own right. They illustrated to jurors and potential customers the quality of colonial timber and woodworking, and were filled with the Company’s wool specimens. Australian commissioners and exhibitors at the Great Exhibition faced the challenging task of improving their generally unfavourable collective selfimage and the equally unflattering images about their communities held by others and expressed in overseas economic reports, popular literature, and dioramas.54 This was the case in Britain, Europe and North America. The public interpreted Australian exhibits in light of commonly held pre- and sometimes misconceptions about the colonies’ pre-industrial economy, convict origins, frontier violence, and large Irish Catholic population. Needless to say, those were not conducive to favourable mid-nineteenth-century receptions. Such images gained currency due to Australia’s distance from England and Europe, and their apparent consistency across colonial borders. The chaotic mineral rushes in 1850 and 1851 did little to improve upon those popular impressions. Rather, some contemporary commentators, De Quincey among them, lumped together the Australian colonies with California and other wild mineral-rush societies. They were all ‘comets’ sailing towards ‘the same object of private gain and public confusion’ founded upon the uncertain promises of gold and silver. Full of energy, zeal and enthusiasm, these races of ‘Barnums on a pre-Adamite scale’ were headed downwards, the Australians ending up as the Californians did, in a large ‘swindle’.55 A rather daunting thick text evolved during the nineteenth century to shape the ways Australians saw themselves and were perceived by others. Colonial officials and exhibitors did what they could to address or circumvent those perceptions, sometimes even taking advantage of them, as were the cases when popular gold nuggets were displayed. Australians also attempted to enhance their image by differentiating local products from those of other exhibitors, colonial and otherwise. Australians vigorously and not always successfully 53 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 3rd edn, p. 177. 54 Alan Beever, ‘From a Place of “Horrible Destitution” to a Paradise of the Working Class: The Transformation of British Working Class Attitudes to Australia, 1841–1851’, Labour History (Australia), 40 (1981), pp. 1–15; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Black Swans; or, Botany Bay Eclogues’, in idem, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 109–33; and Crauford D. W. Goodwin, The Image of Australia: British Perception of the Australian Economy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974). 55 . De Quincey, esp. pp. 304–7. A contemporary differed with De Quincey, arguing that Australia’s mineral rushes would help produce a stable and wealthy society, whereas California’s would lead to ‘disappointment’. Please see ‘California and Australia – Gold and Wool’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 19 (July 1852), pp. 425–6. ‘Social progress’ awaited those immigrating to New South Wales and Victoria; a ‘lawless state of society’ and ‘fraud’ awaited those who chose California instead. My thanks to Dr Nick Fisher (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) for providing me with this source.

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emphasized the unique qualities and size of their exhibits, and offered them as signs of settler progress in the Antipodes. This was not easily achieved in the cases of important items, such as wool, wheat and cotton, which many other British colonies and various other nations could also exhibit and offer to European and English consumers and manufacturers. While reviewing the wool exhibits, Richard Owen, the influential English scientist, listed China, Tibet, Iceland, Scandinavia, the United States, the Cape of Good Hope and the various Australasian colonies as just a few of the many sources for wool.56 He remarked that Australian wool held its own with its ‘very valuable examples’, most particularly those from New South Wales, but still faced considerable competition.57 It proved difficult for Australian commissioners to follow the advice of the colonial showman R. E. N. Twopeny and take advantage of ‘the love of the fashionable and the love of the new.’58 What was truly ‘fashionable’ and ‘new’ among the colonies’ exhibits? Not wool, or much else, except for natural history and ethnography exhibits. Those two types of exhibits suggested in opposite, but complementary, ways, colonial ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’. Like their colonial cousins in Canada and South Africa, the Australian settlers were keen to both contrast themselves with the local indigenous population and embrace the country’s apparently unique landscape, flora and fauna. As relics of apparently ‘savage’ peoples, Maori and Australian Aboriginal tools and weapons, as well as those of North American Indians and South African Zulus, demonstrated by contrast the apparent ‘triumphs’ of early white settlement and ‘progress’ of colonization. Models of indigenous huts and samples of local wares and handicrafts were represented by colonial committees as primitive atavisms in the face of mining equipment and printed volumes. Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales chose two different ways to represent this Darwinian ‘progress’ at the Crystal Palace: the former displayed ‘a melancholy tribute’ to a people facing extinction as soon as 1876 (when the last full-blooded Tasmanian died), while the latter’s contributions ‘showed no sign of the aborigines’ works’, in the words of one visitor.59 The message seemed clear: New South Wales ‘contains no longer any trace of the [Aboriginal] people.’ But, was the message that clear? After all, exhibitors from New South Wales had forwarded some relics and copies of a key to the Australian Aboriginal languages, printed with colonial type and bound with Australian leather.60 56 Richard Owen, ‘Lecture III. On the Raw Materials from the Animal Kingdom’, Lectures on the Progress of the Arts and Science, p. 63. 57 Ibid., p. 72. 58 R. E. N. Twopeny, A Proposal for Holding an Australian Exhibition in London (Sydney, 1883), Australia Pamphlets, no. 20, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London, 7. 59 Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1, p. 54. 60 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 January 1851, p. 2 and 11 January 1851, p. 5. The volume’s official title was A Key to the Structure of the Aboriginal Language, etc., together with the Comparisons of Polynesian and other Dialects. The author was L. E. Threlkeld. New South Wales and Victoria would both prepare similar dictionaries and

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If language and tools were persistent ‘traces’ of the indigene, or reminders that this was not truly a tabula rasa, or empty continent, were they also reminders of the contrast between Aboriginal and settler culture? Did the preservation of local language immediately and irrevocably assign the Aboriginal to a prehistorical era, or suggest an historical one before settlement, perhaps some type of continuity amid the many signs of apparent discontinuity? Hints of social evolution, including bound English dictionaries printed with a local press, seemed to mock exhibits such as the ‘Necklaces of shells, as worn by aborigines of Tasmania’. Did not the dictionaries also suggest a slightly different view of the local past and possible connections between Aboriginals and settlers?61 The absence of Aboriginal exhibits might be the result of their deficient skills and resources, a rather common assumption on the part of Exhibition organizers, visitors and contemporaries. Tallis argued that the result of treating the ‘Aborigines’ as others whose displays were solicited and filled the courts … has been that the same circumstances which render them inferior to civilised men in accumulated property and in acquired knowledge, have operated to leave their show of industrial development in the Exhibition somewhat meagre, whatever the equality of capacity may be conceded to them, and however acute their natural intelligence.62

Grounded in modern principles of classification and organization, the Exhibition displays reconfirmed the hierarchies of the world with very little, if any, nostalgia for worlds lost. On the other hand, had not the limited exhibits also, perhaps, resulted from half-hearted and limited efforts on the part of commissioners, rather than the indigene’s own limited ‘capacity’ or ‘natural intelligence’? Some contemporaries thought so, and the exhibited dictionaries of Australian languages or dialects often suggested a capacity and intelligence calling for additional material exhibits, which were perhaps there, only waiting for shipping and display. Striking closer to a tragic truth, Tallis continued that in the case of Van Diemen’s Land visitors should have expected very few Aboriginal displays, even if the commissioners had exerted themselves and changed the classifications to make them more relevant. Why? What might have been displayed from elsewhere in the Australasian possessions had commissioners done more than advertise and invite? Tallis was clearly not done with his soulful reflection and indictment amid so many celebratory passages about the Great Exhibition. There was at least one other rather profound reason to explain the limited display of indigenous or ‘Aboriginal’ works: ‘In our forty-years’ possession display local languages in other ways at future exhibitions, including the Melbourne Intercolonial (1866) and Paris Universal (1867). Please see Penelope Edmonds, ‘The Le Souef Box: Reflections on Imperial Nostalgia, Material Culture and Exhibitionary Practice in Colonial Victoria’, Australian Historical Studies, 37 (2006), pp. 117–39. 61 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 3rd edn, p. 181. 62 Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, vol. 1, p. 55.

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of the settlement we have utterly destroyed them, by as atrocious a series of oppressions as ever were perpetrated by the unscrupulous strong upon the defenceless feeble.’63 Sobering words for those expecting only congratulatory ones at and from the Crystal Palace. And Tallis did not end there. After all, as he reminded his readers, the Tasmanians ‘had tastes and industry too’, so the few displays observed were only a hint of what might have been from a people who ‘procured paint by burning iron ore’ and constructed water vessels, baskets and boats, but who had been brutally and ‘utterly destroyed’. What might have been displayed if the inhabitants of Tasmania had not ‘been hunted down, as we know they were, and then almost inveigled to be shut up in an island too small for even the few remaining?’ Later visitors curious about Australia’s fauna, flora and indigene could observe displays of each in the new Crystal Palace’s ‘Natural History Department’.64 Reconstituted after the exhibition hall had moved to Sydenham in 1854, the natural history exhibits included representations from the animal and human kingdoms divided between the ‘New’ and ‘Old’ worlds and then again by continents. Among the Australian displays were emus, birds, fish, sponges, ‘numerous plants’, the Norfolk Island Pine, and various other items to be compared and contrasted with Malaysian bears, Chinese yaks, and Central American porcupines, among other non-European species. ‘Singular and strangely peculiar’ forms of natural history from Australia and Tasmania were intended by the new Palace’s organizers to represent ‘the lowest conditions … as if to indicate a rudimentary stage in the world’s history.’65 That was true of floral, animal and human dioramas. The ‘small plot of ground dedicated to the illustration of Australia and New Guinea’ attracted visitors with two ethnological dioramas. One depicted Papuans, described in the racially taxonomic language of the times as ‘neither Malays, nor Negroes, but a mixed race between the two’. They were accompanied by ‘Australian men’, posed to emphasize their positioning in the relatively young racialist evolutionary scheme of the time. In a few years, they could be seen as sure signs of a Social Darwinist vision of human society. Here were hunters, allegedly pursuing their prey in ‘forests’, rather than in the Australian Outback and desert. Some mid-Victorians wrote with sympathy and sophistication about the Australian Aboriginals and their relationship to their environment and landscape, but the Crystal Palace models appealed more to showmanship than science, and popular, rather than learned, sensibilities.

63 Ibid., p. 54. 64 Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park, illus. P. H. Delamotte, 4th edn (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1855), pp. 120–34; Hassam, ‘Portable Iron Structures and Uncertain Colonial Spaces’, pp. 182–7; and Hassam, ‘Aborigines at the Crystal Palace: Portable Colonial Spaces’, in idem, Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain (Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), esp. pp. 52–79. 65 Dr Edward Forbes, ‘Natural History Department’, Crystal Palace Company Official Handbook: Ethnology, Zoology and Botany (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. 92.

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Those models and the indigene were described in the official guidebook as ‘half-starved, lanky, and ill-proportioned’.66 The figures were intended to reveal ‘that excessive projection of the jaw which ethnologists make one of the distinguishing traits in the most degraded forms of man.’ The emphasis was on Australian Aboriginal ‘savagery’ as a reminder of their status vis-à-vis white settlers and visitors to the Crystal Palace and in relation to ‘the varieties of man, animals, and plants … distributed over the globe’ exhibited at the Great Exhibition and its successor. The displays did nothing to challenge and everything to confirm the unfolding racial hierarchies and taxonomies of the day. Nowhere could the visitor read a sorrowful and moralistic defence of the Aborigines, such as the one Tallis had articulated in his texts accompanying the Great Exhibition. At Sydenham, the Australian Aboriginal was ‘naturally’ depicted as ‘low’, if not the ‘lowest’, human rung on the evolutionary ladder, his eventual demise ‘scientifically’ inevitable as a chapter in the narrative of natural history. The Australian exhibits at the new Crystal Palace in Sydenham were not limited to those of the Australian Aboriginals and their surrounding natural history. Among other displays was an Australian gold-digger’s cradle, recommended by one visitor as superior to written descriptions of such common tools. The cradle’s ‘use … will be better understood’, he noted, ‘by an inspection than any description I can give of it.’67 Like that of many other prospectors, this gentleman’s ventures were not particularly successful. He returned to London from Adelaide with less money and both rheumatism and neuralgia. This was a not uncommon warning to emigrants filled with the still more common dreams of finding riches in silver and gold in the Australian colonies at mid century. Yet, not surprisingly, Australian exhibition displays and publications did nothing to dampen such optimism. Although most contemporaries considered Australia’s experience at the Crystal Palace a failure, it did not deter the colonies from participating in many exhibitions after 1851, but, rather, provoked more ambitious and betterorganized participation at such shows. In the face of much criticism and limited praise about their Great Exhibition displays, the Australians prepared for future exhibitions with more resources, funding and time. Meaningful changes included forming official commissions, as some Australians had recommended at the time of the Crystal Palace. Those committees included local politicians, businessmen, scientists and other influential public figures, some of whom had exhibition experience. They often worked together as local, colonial and imperial representatives under the title of a ‘Royal Commission’. On occasion, the same commission, or commissioner, might represent all three polities: e.g. the city of Melbourne, the colony of Victoria, and the British Empire itself. They were heirs to the Australian Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s special subcommittee and its London ‘agent’ at the Great Exhibition. 66 Ibid., pp. 132–3. 67 ‘Adventures on the Melbourne Diggings’, The People’s Magazine, n.s. 5 (1868), pp. 268–71.

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Later, such commissions became more explicitly national, or colonial, in character and reference, the colony of Victoria currency, for example, beginning to carry more significance and authority. Colonial legislators and legislatures played increasing roles as funders, organizers and members of such commissions. Well-known and experienced Australians living and working in host cities, such as London and Paris, were typically included as active members. Applicants for exhibition commission and staff positions with the New South Wales court at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 included those with positions at previous exhibitions, as well as professional advertisers, showmen and journalists. Colonial officials expected employees and commissioners ‘to organise or assist in organising a representative collection of the industries of the colony, to write a pamphlet probably on the resources of New South Wales with special reference to the exhibits and generally to push the colony in the Garden City and in the United States.’68 This is not to say, of course, that such commissions and their members were above and beyond controversy or reproach. It was perhaps not ironic that such commissions and individual commissioners became controversial as the roles that they assumed at exhibitions, the monies required, and the public and private issues surrounding them all became larger. Even with such controversies, general official and public reaction at home and abroad to Australian exhibits improved dramatically, to a great degree as a result of the expanded and more professional efforts of commissioners and staff. This was often due to the replication of Henry Cole’s 1851 scheme of local organizing committees. Each colonial commission acted as an official umbrella for a series of more local bodies, responsible for advertising the upcoming exhibitions and both collecting and shipping the exhibits in their region or city. At the time of the Paris Universal Exposition, only four years after the Great Exhibition, local Sydney editors extolled their colonial commissioners’ efforts and contended that the variety and quality of exhibits from New South Wales would bring additional trade and general improvements.69 One London newspaper praised ‘[t]he manner in which our Australian colonies have exerted themselves to obtain an adequate representation of their industry’ at the French show, in contrast to their disappointing presence in 1851.70 This time around, the Australian effort ‘evinces an amount of energy and businesslike conduct, which puts to the blush many other exhibitors.’ No such words had been spoken or written four years earlier. Whereas not all of the Australian colonies had participated at the Crystal Palace for a variety of reasons, each one sent exhibits to the subsequent 68 Percy R. Theggy to C. W. Darley, 10 September 1893, Papers of C. W. Darley, 1865–1893, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, A 3144, fols 385–6. 69 ‘The Paris Exhibition and Mr. Martin’, Illustrated Sydney News, 11 November 1854, p. 358. 70 ‘The Paris Exhibition and our Australian Colonies’, The Morning Chronicle, 18 May 1855, p. 6 and The Morning Chronicle, 7 June 1855, p. 3.

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London International in 1862, where the British Colonies covered over 13,000 square feet in South Kensington’s new exhibition halls.71 That amount of space dwarfed what the Australians had enjoyed in 1851. At that time, New South Wales had been allotted only four thousand square feet for the Great Exhibition, and nearly one-half of all of the space provided for the colonies was reserved for passages and other non-display purposes. The additional space at the subsequent London International was put to good use. John Timbs, who had been very critical of the Australasian contribution in 1851, now exclaimed that ‘Australia attracted most attention; as well from the unprecedented rapidity with which her resources have been developed, as from the fine quality of some of the objects displayed.’72 The ‘few’ ores and ‘case or two’ of wools at the Crystal Palace had been supplanted by a ‘rich profusion … of all the gifts with which nature can endow a land to make it great and flourishing.’ Timbs devoted ten pages to listing and describing the Australasian displays at South Kensington.73 He was hardly alone in that reversal of opinion about the Australian exhibits and exhibitors. It was shared and expressed, for example, by William Westgarth, a keen local advocate of exhibitions and Australian participation in and hosting of such grand events. His review of the colony of Victoria written during the mid-1860s included considerable praise in retrospect for ‘the varied and excellent industrial products’ displayed by colonial exhibitors and organized by colonial commissioners at the International Exhibition in 1862.74 Those ‘products’ shined in contrast to the Crystal Palace failures, a shining which resulted in part from the efforts of the colony’s own official commissioners, Sir Redmond Barry and J. G. Knight. Victoria’s gold pyramid deserved praise, but so did Barry’s constant labours. All such statements began with recognition and reminders of the Great Exhibition’s failings. ‘Striking … was the advance of the later over the earlier exhibition’, concluded Westgarth, echoing the general consensus about Victoria and the other Australian colonies at the two London exhibitions. A ‘few medals and commendations awarded to Australia were chiefly for samples of wool, wheat and flour, some wines, and specimens of colonial woods’ at the Crystal Palace. New South Wales had dominated the 1851 Australasian displays. Wheat, wool, gold, candles, woods and ‘an almost numberless variety of objects’ filled South Kensington’s Australian courts eleven years later, and did so in a way which suggested the importance of Victoria, as much, if not more, than the status of

71 A Guide to the International Exhibition; with Plans of the Building, An Account of its Rise, Progress and Completion, with Notices of its Principal Contents, ed. George Frederick Pardon (London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1862), pp. 58–61. 72 Timbs, p. 269. 73 Ibid., pp. 269–79. 74 William Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria; its History, Commerce and Gold Mining; its Social and Political Institutions; Down to the End of 1863; With Remarks, Incidental and Comparative with other Australian Colonies (London: Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, 1864), p. 349.

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its senior neighbour, New South Wales. We might ignore at our disadvantage the strong incentives of intra-Australasian, or intercolonial competition, particularly, but not exclusively, between Victoria and New South Wales. That was among the tensions driving colonial participation at the exhibitions, but also undermining joint or collective ‘Australian’ exhibition projects, such as truly or comprehensively intercolonial courts and exhibitions. The overseas organizers’ ‘national’ courts shaped and reflected political divisions, whereas those organizing exhibition courts by type of exhibit would have required at least collective ‘Australian’ exhibits, recognition of a collective ‘Australian’ identity, or interest. Although the International Exhibition was receding in memory only a few years later, Westgarth recalled the various awards and recommendations earned in 1862 by Victoria’s contributors and proclaimed the ‘importance’ of such contributions not only for the Australians themselves, but for the success of the Exhibition itself.75 He was so enthusiastic about Victoria’s success in London that he encouraged the colony to participate in New Zealand’s first exhibition, scheduled for 1865 in Dunedin, and to use that participation to consider hosting future hemispheric shows. Melbourne might host the next one, and Sydney the one after that. He was among the first ‘Australian’ exhibition advocates, or advocates of ‘Australian’ exhibitions and an ‘Australian’ exhibition tradition, driven by competition as a Victorian with neighbouring New South Wales. His concept of Australian nationalism, if not early federation, paid homage to and created space for competition among the specific colonies. The expansion in the Australian colonies’ display space, their official commissions, and the quality and quantity of their exhibits continued at subsequent North American and European exhibitions. Australian displays grew to occupy over 110,000 square feet by the time of the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908. Such ambitious efforts reflected the growing consensus among influential Australians that participation in overseas exhibitions would promote migration and investment, introduce local goods to a larger international market, improve the floating of loans to the colonies, and make the host countries better known among Australians. In this case, Australia’s ‘newness’ might be to its advantage, since older, more established countries often had fewer pressing, or at least different and less urgent, inducements to exhibit. Here were opportunities to announce Australia’s and each colony’s presence on the world stage increasingly on its and their own terms. Exhibition activities and displays were not disconnected to politics back home, or ways to negotiate and imagine Australian society for Australians, as well as for others. Participation at overseas exhibitions helped define and express what was ‘Australia’ and who was an ‘Australian’ in a variety of ways, not the least being the selection of particular raw materials and manufactured goods as privileged economic pursuits and of particular commissioners as representatives of the Australian polities. In both cases, the choices suggested to contemporaries and

75 Ibid., pp. 388–92.

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now to historians how Australians at the time defined themselves and how they wanted others to define them. The colony of Victoria, one of the new colonial kids on the imperial block, was particularly aggressive at the post-1851 overseas shows, for most of those local and overseas reasons, including the opportunities to represent itself to the British, fellow Australians, and ‘the world’. Its commissioners forwarded exhibits to nearly every significant exhibition, including the series of French Universal Expositions (1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900), and those held as far and wide as Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876) and Calcutta (1883–84). Sir Redmond Barry accompanied many of those exhibits, acting as the colony’s ‘authorized representative’, or executive commissioner, a figure defined at the time of the Great Exhibition, but notably absent from its Australasian courts.76 Seemingly everywhere at the later shows, as well as in Melbourne itself, Barry and his fellow colonial commissioners arranged and introduced exhibits, answered questions about Australia from potential investors and emigrants, studied the displays offered in other courts, wrote official reports and correspondence, and finally repacked their own exhibits for return, exchange or a future exposition.77 Such commissioners addressed the ‘tyranny of distance’ in all of its forms shaping Australian politics, economics and culture by making significant and enduring personal and institutional connections at the shows and bringing material culture back to the colonies for local study and display. Finally, there were several other important longer-term Australian legacies from the Crystal Palace experience. First, the Australians began organizing their own exhibitions, drawing upon their participation at the Great Exhibition. Some were preliminaries to overseas shows and others were local and national exhibitions in their own right, what the Agricultural Society of New South Wales termed ‘national institutions’.78 These began in Sydney and Melbourne as early as 1854. At that point, they were somewhat unambitious endeavours 76 The Times, 10 September 1851, p. 5, and ‘Sir Redmond Barry, K.C.M.G., LL.D,’, The Australasian Sketcher, 4 December 1880, pp. 199–200. 77 Sir Redmond Barry, Exhibition Correspondence, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Box 122/2, fol. 151. 78 ‘Annual Report, 1877’, The Journal of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales, 3rd series, Part I, 1878, p. 7. For general discussion of Australian exhibitions, please see John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977), pp. 64– 74, and Graeme Davison, ‘Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions’, in S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (eds), Australian Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 158–77. More specific topics and events are discussed in Peter Bridges, ‘The Sydney International Exhibition of 1879: The Translation of Ideas into Reality’, unpublished manuscript, 1986; Paul Fox, ‘Exhibition City: Melbourne and the 1880 International Exhibition’, Transition, 31 (1990), pp. 62–7; Carmel McKeogh and Norman Etherington, ‘Jubilee 500’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 12 (1984), pp. 3–21; and John Parris and A. G. L. Shaw, ‘The Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880–1881’, Victorian Historical Journal, 51 (1980), pp. 237–54.

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on the part of local governments and voluntary societies; however, such shows enabled the Australians to forward better organized and higher quality displays to exhibitions in Paris and London. Those local shows drew upon the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society’s exhibition subcommittee’s call in 1850 for a public display in the Government Domain of exhibits bound for the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. That unrealized goal was more than realized in the form of future preliminary exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, starting with the pair held in 1854 prior to the following year’s Paris Universal Exposition.79 These local shows became normal and expected events in the cities’ and colonies’ public calendars, and expanded their size and scope. By 1875, visitors to the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition enjoyed displays from Britain, America, Europe, Australasia, ‘the neighboring Islands’, and ‘for the first time … the Empire of Japan and the British Settlements in the Indian Seas.’80 Such second-generation shows offered a larger galaxy of exhibits in two fundamental directions: they expanded the type of exhibits beyond the previous emphasis on agricultural displays, and also now included many goods not intended for display at the upcoming overseas exhibitions. Only four years later, Sydney hosted the first Australian large-scale international exhibition that provided visitors with the opportunity to observe and consume goods from nearly every corner of the globe. Sponsors echoed the Great Exhibition’s bold claims as they invited ‘all the world’ to observe the results of free trade and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture, which had allegedly placed the colony ‘in kindly competition with the most ancient States of the old and new world.’81 The more ambitious Australian international exhibitions were also intended to be grand spectacles announcing the host city and colony not only to itself and fellow Australians, but to the wider world. Sydney’s did so with quite a bang in 1879. William S. Macleay visited the rehearsal for the musical entertainment at the official opening, recording that ‘there must have been over 500 voices in addition to many instruments.’82 That was only one part of the opening extravaganza. These were cultural occasions with few competitors in nineteenth-century Australia. Sydney’s success was later duplicated at Melbourne’s own International Exhibition the following year. Exhibitions 79 Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Commissioners, Sydney, November, 1854 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1854). 80 International Exhibition at Philadelphia, 1876. Report of the Commissioners for Victoria to His Excellency the Governor (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1877), and Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition, 1875. Preparatory to the Philadelphia Exhibition, 1876. Opened 2nd September, 1875. Official Catalogue of Exhibits (Melbourne: M’Carron, Bird & Co., 1875). 81 Report of the Royal Commission for the Australian International Exhibition to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, English Parliamentary Papers, 1882 [c. 3099], xxviii, p. 269. 82 William S. Macleay Diary, 1879, Saturday, 13 September 1879, Macleay Museum, University of Sydney.

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continued to mark the ‘progress’ of the colonies and commemorated key dates, such as 1888, the official centennial of European settlement, an historical moment celebrated at Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition.83 Secondly, the organization of and stimulus to economic goods improved local production in some areas and connected some Australian producers with overseas consumers in new or strengthened trade networks. The wool and wine trades, for example, gained considerably from exhibiting at such shows.84 One chronicler of the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition noted how the ‘huge trophy of [wool] bales’ illustrated the magnitude of Australia’s trade in that important commodity and, in doing so, attracted eager continental buyers.85 Exhibitions provided opportunities to create new and expand existing markets for these and other Australian goods, although the economic expectations generally outpaced the economic realities. That disparity did not stop Australians from trying, or from waxing nostalgic about the commercial effectiveness of exhibiting their goods. Looking back in the final year of Queen Victoria’s reign, one Queensland pastoralist was quite confident that much of his economic success resulted from his flock’s ‘first prize for fine wool in the Great [sic] Exhibition in London in 1862.’86 He admitted that prizes garnered at local shows also helped, but was convinced that the Exhibition medal established his flock’s reputation and generated ‘top price’ for those sheep. Increasingly, displays of Australian commercial goods not only changed local production and thus affected local society, but also pushed the development of direct trade relations with overseas countries and other British colonies, challenging England’s central and dominant economic role. That role included acting as middleman for Australian overseas trade and providing what Australians wanted more cheaply than could any other country. When that was not the case, though, why not bypass England?, as the author of a Melbourne essay queried in 1869.87 Australian chambers of commerce and of manufacturers advocated participation in exhibitions for such reasons. The Victorian Chamber of Manufactures was notably persistent and outspoken about securing ‘the proper representation’ of the colony at shows in

83 Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 49–52 and 60–69, and eadem, ‘Centennial Celebrations’, in Graeme Davison, J. W. McCarthy and Ailsa McLeary (eds), Australians: 1888 (Broadway, N.S.W.: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987), pp. 1–29. 84 ‘Victorian Wines at the Exhibition’, in Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria, at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1884), pp. 13–14. 85 Eugene Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1867), p. 329. 86 Personal Reminiscences by John Watts, Allendale, Wimborne, 1901, State Library of Queensland, Film 0003, pp. 81–2 and 92. 87 ‘The Imperial Connection’, The Colonial Monthly (Melbourne), 4 (1869), pp. 107–8.

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88

New Zealand and ‘other parts of the world’. The Chamber made the case that participating at exhibitions would ‘advance’ local manufacturing and commerce, a link which would be made more secure by building ‘a Permanent Exhibition Building’ in Melbourne itself. The Chamber’s calls were echoed by many Australians contending during and after their own international exhibitions that direct links offered additional ways to develop the local economies. Some Australians argued at the time that steam and trade links with such far-flung countries as India, the United States, France and Italy were not only ways to expedite the passage of goods and visitors to the shows themselves, but also more fundamental ways to bypass England when, as was becoming increasingly apparent to some, her position as intermediary was not politically beneficial, or economically necessary. Such Australians advocated direct trade with foreign and other colonial partners as the natural and desirable results of participating in the exhibitions. Direct connections had already been established at the shows. Why not continue them afterwards? That question was asked by commercial groups and individuals not only in Melbourne and Sydney, but also in Calcutta, Paris and Rome. Italian exhibitors and agents were particularly keen on promoting direct trade between Italy and the colony of Victoria in the aftermath of their experiences at the Melbourne International Exhibition.89 The benefits and costs of direct commercial connections were among the critical issues at stake whenever Australians debated whether to officially participate in overseas exhibitions. That debate, begun in response to solicitations for the Crystal Palace in 1851, continued throughout the century, shaped by both local and overseas issues. Debates about spending funds to collect, ship and display objects at British, European, North American and South Asian exhibitions reflected and influenced Australians’ perceptions of their place in the larger world, while reminding them about the powerful convergence of civic, colonial, imperial and foreign issues. By responding to requests for funds and exhibits, a significant number of Australians confronted their sense of isolation, distance and disengagement. Funds spent to display wool in London not only affected trade relations with Britain, but economic and social relations back home in New South Wales as well. The answers to exhibition requests from abroad reveal what Australians thought about overseas exhibitions and how they might help or hinder the realization, if not the definition, of local, sometimes ‘national’, objectives. Debates about participating at such shows were often intense and spirited in Australian newspapers and legislatures, with much at stake for the colonies. 88 ‘The Victorian Chamber of Manufactures. Rules’, in The Fifth Annual Report and Balance-Sheet of the Victorian Chamber of Manufactures (Melbourne: Charles Troedel & Co., 1882). 89 The Thirty-First Annual Report by the Committee of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, April 1882 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & M’Cutcheon, 1882), and Melbourne Chamber of Commerce Minute Book, 1878–1886, La Trobe State Library, Melbourne, MS 10917.

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Was too much money being spent when funds were scarce, or when apparently more pressing local concerns made claims to public monies? Were one’s local political opponents taking advantage of the event for their own benefits? If a host country had tariffs and duties, was it profitable in the short or even long term to send Australian commercial goods? Nearly all debates ended with some official sanctioning for Australian participation in the forms of a royal commission and public funding. At the very least, public officials, such as colonial botanists, sent displays as part of their regular employment. The disputes over public funding and official participation at overseas exhibitions reflected and were formed by often deeper domestic divisions, since discussions in elite and wider circles crystallized around other crucial issues shaping Australian public life in the second half of the nineteenth century. While recognizing that some of the legislative divisions and public debates about Australian participation at overseas exhibitions were due to different political party affiliations, we can still get the sense that such discussions were coloured and shaped by significant extra-exhibition issues. Understanding such debates might help us better understand not only those wider political, economic and social matters, but also how the Australians perceived exhibitions in general and their participation in them more specifically. In essence, what were exhibitions good for? What did Australians hope to gain or at least not lose by participating, particularly at overseas exhibitions in Europe, Great Britain and North America? Australians from New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were not bashful about answering such questions during the latter half of the nineteenth century. For example, each of those colonies sent significant exhibits and representatives to Calcutta for its International Exhibition in 1883–84, preceded, accompanied and then succeeded by volumes of Exhibitionrelated literature. Those included petitions for formal governmental funding, comments about what might be gained by participating, and official reports and catalogues. The Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia and the local Chamber of Manufactures in Adelaide were among the most vocal advocates of their colony’s official participation at the Indian exhibition. Both bodies appointed members to a deputation to secure political and financial support from the Chief Secretary. They shared the refrigerating room with other Australian colonies exhibiting meat, fruit and vegetable samples, and also forwarded educational and social information. They were devoted not only to commercial success at the show, but also to the opportunity to advertise South Australia for potential immigrants and investors. Much, if not nearly all, of these exhibits were intended for Anglo-Indian, European and British visitors; less so for South Asians.90

90 Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883. Minutes of the South Australian Committee of Management, 1883–1885. Auditor-General’s Papers, South Australia Public Record Office, GRG 44/63. Members of the deputations included C. J. Coates, J. F. Conigrave, D. Murray and, among other influential local figures, R. D. Ross.

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In this case, the South Australian generation of the 1880s was drawing and building upon claims that their predecessors had made at the time of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855. Thirty years before the Calcutta event, local colonial advocates had urged public support because ‘[i]t was in the interest of the colony that we should have justice done to us at the Paris Exhibition, to make the place as well known as possible; to give some clear idea of what South Australia was, and to give some notion of its importance.’91 The urgency of these desires was driven by the recent failures at the Great Exhibition; the fact that other Australian colonies, including Victoria and New South Wales, were organizing for Paris; and that South Australians were keen on defining themselves as a ‘free’ colony in contrast to the ‘convict’ origins of their neighbours. Organizers in South Australia and New South Wales scrambled to represent their particular colonies, notably the ‘mercantile community’ within each, eager to seize upon the commercial opportunities of strengthening old and creating new markets for their goods. Wool, cotton, tobacco, printing and mineral exhibits might find eager consumers and investors. Perhaps it is also interesting and relevant to add, though, that at the same time that each colony was seemingly pursuing its own interests and exhibits, there was some, if limited in the early years, discussion of a united Australian court. ‘However distinct the characteristics or separate the interests of each’ colony might very well be, there was a serious proposal on the part of a few South Australian and New South Wales exhibition commissioners to create for Paris in 1855 a comprehensive and large collective exhibit. What drove that proposal in good part was the recent memory of the ‘meagre and illsorted collection’ representing the Australian colonies at the Crystal Palace in 1851. As early as the 1850s, then, there were some prominent colonial figures intrigued with the possibility of displaying a stronger collective intercolonial Australian face at overseas exhibitions, and thus emphasizing common social and economic conditions, rather than emphasizing political differences.92 Among the prominent colonial figures considering the united Australian court and exhibits were B. T. Finniss and Alfred Stephen, both involved in exhibition activities and both equally active in pursuing local and, perhaps, joint mercantile advantages. In these among other ways, key Australians, Australian organizations, and parts of Australia became increasingly aware of and sometimes connected to a larger Australian, imperial and, perhaps, global economy and society. The integration was hardly complete or comprehensive, but there were sectors, such as wool and minerals, and groups, such as scientists, linked to a larger world at the exhibitions. Rather than provoking parochialism or traditionalism, as has occurred with so much of contemporary globalization, this integration tended to widen horizons and challenge older political and social identities. 91 ‘Paris Universal Exhibition, 1855’, South Australia Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, 1854, Paper Number 16. 92 ‘N.S.W. Commissioners Circular Letter to Colonial Secretary’, 15 February 1854, ibid.

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Australians came to better understand themselves in light of comparisons made at overseas exhibitions; comparisons which helped define what it meant to be an Australian in the context of both international and local communities. Participation at the exhibitions and linkages with other colonies, Britain and nation-states, such as Germany, resulted in a fundamental rethinking of what it meant to be ‘Australian’ in a way that more often than not challenged established ‘imperial’ notions and conventions. These were not necessarily displaced, but now were less likely to be taken for granted as ‘natural’, and often reinterpreted by those participating in one way or another at the exhibitions with seemingly more local ‘national’ identities and assumptions, with their own particular visions of society. Participating in overseas exhibitions and organizing their own fundamentally helped colonists in Melbourne, New South Wales and South Australia imagine, envision and reconstruct their identities as overseas settlers within colonial borders, and eventually as Australian nationalists across such borders. Or, perhaps more accurately and precisely, the exhibition experience changed the balance of those still dually felt and jointly expressed identities such as, for example, ‘New South Wales’ and ‘Australian’. There might be different and competing identities at any single exhibition, and the Australian identity might certainly change from time to time. Yet, exhibitions were one way among many by which such individuals and groups publicly addressed, although not always reconciled, the often conflicting sources of ethnic, political, social, regional and religious identity in nineteenth-century Australasia. Even seemingly ‘imperial’ exhibitions, such as those held in London after 1851, or ‘imperial courts’, such as those in Paris, often brought more local nationalist, social and economic results. Australians could take stock of themselves rather than relying on the British to do so. They could publicly wrestle with compelling sources of identity and representation, such as trade policies. Participation at exhibitions presented Australia and Australians to the world, and, in doing so, quickened and sharpened the larger public debate about who was Australian and what was Australia. Such a process produced many things ‘very new and very showy’ by the end of the nineteenth century, including ‘Australian’ (rather than ‘Colonial’, or ‘British Imperial’) exhibition courts in Chicago (1893) and Paris (1900), Australia’s own international exhibitions, and the political reality of the Australian Federation and Commonwealth by 1901, only fifty years after the Australians’ apparent failure to collectively display what was new and showy at the Great Exhibition.

PART 2 Europe, the Orient, and the Spaces in Between

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Chapter 6

Russia and the Crystal Palace in 1851* David C. Fisher

In 1851, French correspondent Alexis de Valon captured the Russian Empire’s image problem in his review of the Great Exhibition: ‘I do not know Russia, and this causes me much regret. It seems that there is not another country in the entire world about which such a false understanding is held’.1 Russians shared Valon’s assertion that the tsarist empire was misrepresented and thus unknown in western Europe. An image of barbaric people living in arctic cold and ruled by tyrannical despots was established in the mid-sixteenth century by the earliest English travel accounts of Russia and remained remarkably unchanged into the Victorian period.2 The presence of a Russian display at the Great Exhibition testified to the desire of tsarist officials and subjects to combat Russophobia and stereotypes of Russians that were common currency in Western travelogues and journalism. The decision to participate in the Great Exhibition was in part a reaction against the most popular travelogue of the 1840s about the Russian Empire, the Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839. His notoriously scathing commentary repeated clichés that characterized Russia as a place where ‘the veneer of European civilization was too thin to be credible’.3 Tsar Nicholas I, and the additional few Russian readers who saw a copy of Russia in 1839, were stung * Research for this essay was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship from the United States Department of Education, and grants from the Indiana University Russian and East European Studies Institute and Department of History. 1 Alexis de Valon, ‘Progulka vokrug sveta v zdanii Londonskoi vystavki’, Sovremennik, 29/1 (1851), Otd. [section] 6, 20. Originally appeared as ‘Le tour du monde a l’exposition de Londres’, in Revue de Deux Mondes. 2 M. S. Anderson, Britain’s Discovery of Russia 1553–1816 (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 233–5. Anderson argues that ‘there are few better examples [than Britain] of the tenacity with which popular conceptions of the nature of an alien society, once established, are adhered to, or of the slowness with which they are eroded by time and facts’ (p. 235). Anthony Cross seconds this argument in The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and Bibliography (Oxford: W. A. Meeauws, 1985), p. 7. 3 Quoted in George Frost Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 79–80. The 1800-page, fourvolume, first edition of La Russie en 1839 was published in 1843. Subsequent official and pirated editions quickly followed, as did condensed versions and translations in

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by Custine’s caustic criticism and responded actively to mitigate its impact. Among the European reviews that roundly condemned the book’s factual errors and hyperbole were a number of anonymous essays presumably sponsored by Russian officials.4 Tsarist authorities also attempted to counter Custine’s popular work by providing support for a more scholarly investigation of Russia by a foreigner, Studies on the Interior of Russia by August von Haxthausen.5 His research on Russia’s traditional social institutions, the Tsar’s advisors believed, would improve Russia’s slandered reputation in western Europe.6 Studies was well received in Europe, and translated quickly from German into French and English in 1848. When the British invited all nations to the Great Exhibition, Russian government officials, members of voluntary associations, and private individuals recognized an opportunity more important than any travelogue or scholarly study to make Russia properly and objectively known to a European public. They believed that an exhibit of Russia’s rich natural resources, industrial achievements and native ingenuity would impart a corrective and truthful image of the tsarist empire’s wealth, grandeur and claim to a rightful place among European powers. Participation in the Exhibition raised a number of questions and opportunities for reflection about Russian identity. The Russian exhibition commission wrestled with the problem of how to represent Russia in material form and what scope to give private subjects in shaping the exhibit. Once in place, Russia’s display proved popular with fair-going crowds, but it elicited commentary from the British press that simply reworded the old stereotypes of despotism and servility by which Europeans were accustomed to understand the tsarist empire. Shrugging off foreign criticism, Russian observers used the experience at the Great Exhibition to reflect on how a world’s fair could benefit Russia. Russian government officials, scientists, land-owners and others who visited London debated the effectiveness of the display in making their country properly known. They highlighted opportunities for economic development at home by exporting Russia’s raw materials and importing Western technology. Additionally, Russian visitors to the Great Exhibition used the spectacle of international competition and comparison to ponder the problem of Western cultural and material influence on Russian identity.

German, Dutch and English. By 1846, European readers had purchased approximately 200 thousand copies. 4 Kennan makes the case that the Russian government inspired and financed these anonymous reviews in his study: ibid., pp. 97–101. 5 August von Haxthausen’s Studies originally appeared in 1847–52 as Studien über die Zustände, das Volksleben, und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (vols 1 and 2, Hanover: In der Hahn’schen Hofbuchhandlung, 1847; vol. 3, Berlin: B. Behr, 1852). French, English and Russian versions were published between 1848 and 1870. 6 Fredrick Starr makes this argument in his introduction to August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. xxxix.

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In response to the British invitation, Tsar Nicholas I asked his Ministers of Foreign Affairs, State Domains and Finance to recommend whether or not Russia should participate. The three ministers understood that the Exhibition’s fundamental goal was to promote free trade and celebrate industrial progress in a competition that compared developments in machinery and manufacturing. Russia’s protectionist tariffs and comparatively undeveloped industry stood in sharp contrast to the Exhibition’s purpose. Nevertheless, the three ministers recognized the first world’s fair as an opportunity to influence public opinion in Great Britain, and Europe in general, as well as to promote the economic interests of Russian agriculturists and manufacturers. The products of Russia’s nascent industry, the ministers conceded to the Tsar, could not compete at the Exhibition with the technological advances of leading industrial nations like Great Britain, France and Belgium. By comparison, Russian manufactures were either of lesser quality or too expensive. However, promoting Russia’s raw materials, especially agricultural produce, which could compete on the world market, provided a good reason to participate. Even the image of Russia’s inferior industrial development could be put to good use before the court of European public opinion. Sensible fair visitors, the ministers suggested, would see for themselves that tariffs reflected the Russian government’s efforts to protect the country’s fledgling industrialists, rather than a greedy desire to raise state revenues. Observers would understand that the Russians were protecting their emerging industry just as European governments had protected their own until their manufactures were competitive on the world market. In any case, by participating, Russia would avoid offending public opinion in Great Britain, which was, after all, the most important consumer of Russian exports.7 The Tsar accepted the three ministers’ recommendation and established an imperial commission to organize Russia’s participation in the Great Exhibition. This commission was charged with promoting the Exhibition in Russia, selecting the best exhibits submitted from the diverse areas of the empire, and arranging their shipment to London and their installation and maintenance in the Exhibition building. The three ministers agreed that the commission’s purpose was to neither restrict nor compel participation, but to ‘assist anyone and everyone in Russia to take part in the world’s fair’. ‘Everyone’, they emphasized, ‘should have the opportunity to submit items for the exhibition’.8 The six-member commission was evenly split between representatives from the Ministries of Finance and State Domains, who proceeded to promote the Exhibition and solicit exhibits in isolation from each other. Coordinated, interministerial cooperation came to a practical end with the submission of the three ministers’ report to the Tsar. Almost as an afterthought, copies of the report were sent to the Ministries of War, the Navy and the Imperial Court so that they too would contribute exhibits from their factories and workshops.9 7 Rossiisskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [RGIA], fond [f.] 398, opis [op.] 15, delo [d.] 4850a, listi [ll.] 71–5. 8 Ibid., ll. 75–6. 9 Ibid., ll. 77–82.

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The Russian reading public was well aware of Britain’s plans for the Great Exhibition before the Tsar accepted the invitation to participate and Russia’s exhibit organizers began their publicity efforts. Without commenting on whether or not Russia should participate, the editors of Russian newspapers and journals printed announcements from the British Royal Commission and articles from The Times of London describing the significant amounts raised to fund the Exhibition. Even though the decision to participate was made at the end of March 1850, announcements in the press did not begin to appear until May. The publicity campaign lacked unity. Announcements from the Imperial Commission reflected the orientation of the Department of Manufactures and Internal Trade in the Ministry of Finance, while those from the Ministry of State Domains appealed primarily to agriculturists. Despite the lack of cohesion between the two halves of the commission, their separate appeals for public participation shared common themes and contradictions. Both diminished the element of competition inherent in the Exhibition. Appeals for participation explained that Russia’s goal in London was not to compete with other countries, but to educate foreigners about Russian agriculture and industry, ‘to correct untrue judgments about the state of our industry’.10 Simultaneously, the appeals lauded the benefits of competition. Minister of State Domains, Pavel Kiselev, argued that exhibitions, like those organized by the agricultural department of his ministry since 1843, were important. ‘They bring landowners together’, he explained, ‘and unite them with consumers to whom previously unknown products are introduced … they make known work and inventiveness and thus stimulate competition’. The Great Exhibition offers these same benefits on an international scale, Kiselev argued.11 This lack of clarity over whether or not Russia was competing at the Great Exhibition had a significant effect on the organizers’ ability to collect exhibits from manufacturers and agriculturists. The Imperial Commission published straightforward rules for participation. Would-be exhibitors were invited to send materials, at their own cost, to St Petersburg or Odessa. In order to deliver the exhibits to London and install them in time for the Exhibition’s opening day of 1 May 1851, the Imperial Commissioners set a deadline for submitting exhibits of 31 August 1850. They hoped to ship the exhibits collected in St Petersburg to London before the Baltic Sea was closed by ice. In keeping with the policy of assisting domestic industry, the government agreed to pay the costs for transporting, installing and maintaining Russia’s exhibits. Russia’s manufacturers and industrialists

10 Ob”iavlenie ot vysochaishe i uchrezhdennoi v S.-Peterburge komissii o Londonskoi vystavke (St Petersburg, 1850), p. 1. 11 Priglashenie gg. chlenam Moskovskogo obshchestva sel’skogo khoziaistva k uchastiiu vo vsemirnoi vystavke v Londone i v Otechestvennoi vystavke v Moskve v 1851 godu (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1850), p. 5. Kiselev’s announcement appeared in a number of additional sources, including RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850a, ll. 43–6; and Moskovskie Vedomosti, 4 May 1850, p. 605.

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were asked ‘to send only exemplary materials which will attract attention … and which promise to open markets’.12 Even before public announcements appeared in the press, officials in the Ministries of Finance and State Domains had begun exercising the internal channels of their respective ministries to appeal for exhibits from institutions, organizations and individuals under their purview. The Imperial Commission appears to have played a much lesser role in collecting exhibits than the ministries. The most significant roles in shaping Russia’s exhibit were played by Ivan Fullon, the Director of the Mining Department at the Ministry of Finance, and Aleksei Levshin, the Director of the Agricultural Department at State Domains. They mainly relied upon the British description of the exhibit classification categories to guide their requests. Otherwise, no conceptual plan united Fullon’s and Levshin’s efforts to shape a specific image for the exhibit other than an ambiguous desire to present a ‘complete picture’ of Russia. Fullon drew up a list of items, from ores to damask steel, produced in the Ural, Altai and Olonets mines and factories, and sent the regional head of each mining district a specific request for exhibits. He sent twenty-one private factory-owners a copy of the British Exhibition announcement and invited them to participate as well.13 Factory bosses of state-owned enterprises dutifully carried out Fullon’s request and assembled a large and diverse set of materials from the vast resources under their direction.14 The manufacturers and industrialists began to respond immediately, but they were rarely enthusiastic. Neither the notion of an international exhibition nor competition excited their energies or imaginations. The majority of factory-owners explained to Fullon that their manufactures were too poor in quality to merit exhibition. Iron factory owner Grigorii Stroganov offered a typical explanation. He informed Fullon that he would not send anything for the Exhibition since none of his works met the British organizers’ request that ‘exhibits should consist exclusively of items which are worthy of attention for their excellence or newness or for advantages in saving labour and expense’. Others argued that an exhibition directed attention only to the superficial appearance of an object, and provided no insight into its intrinsic value. The manager of the Demidov Brothers’ factories explained to Fullon that the only way to properly assess the unfinished products produced in their iron factories was through scientific analysis and extended use, not through public display. Factory owner Sergei Stroganov took this line of argument a step further and explained that an exhibition of Russian metal would say nothing about the local conditions under which it was produced. For the sake of argument, Stroganov offered to submit his sheet metal only if it appeared with the caveat that the price reflected his costs for social services to the ten thousand people living in the vicinity of his factory. Unlike in the West, 12 Ob”iavlenie ot vysochaishe i uchrezhdennoi v S.-Peterburge komissii, pp. 1–2; and Priglashenie gg. chlenam, pp. 7–8. 13 RGIA, f. 37, op. 1, d. 289, ll. 1–2, 20–34, 35–7. 14 Ibid., ll. 69–73, 76–7, 155, 163, 183, 199.

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Stroganov implied, a Russian factory-owner is obligated by law to devote a certain percentage of his profits to maintain the aged, crippled, widows and orphans, to provide medical treatment for the sick, supply training for the young, and, according to tradition, provide an old-age pension to foremen and allow them to continue living in factory housing. Sheet metal from his factory, Stroganov asserted, would appear overpriced on the European market.15 At the Ministry of State Domains, Aleksei Levshin showed particular interest and energy in soliciting exhibits for the Exhibition. He had the full support of Minister Kiselev, and together they sent letters and announcements to state officials, land-owners and voluntary associations from the Polish territories in the west, to Siberia beyond the Urals, and from Odessa on the Black Sea, to Arkhangelsk near the Arctic Circle. Their correspondence reached the governors-general of the empire, the provincial authorities, the Ministry of State Domains’ regional chambers, the Ministry’s experimental farms, and nearly ninety corresponding members of the Ministry’s Academic Committee and societies devoted to the study of horticulture, agriculture and economics. One of these associations, the Imperial Free Economic Society, was in the process of organizing a national agricultural exhibition to be held in St Petersburg in September 1850. Levshin and Kiselev encouraged participants in the Free Economic Society exhibition to submit their exhibits to the Imperial Commission for dispatch to London at the close of the Society’s show. Kiselev asked government officials to reprint information about the Great Exhibition in the local press and assist would-be exhibitors in any way possible. Individuals and voluntary associations were solicited not only for participation, but for advice as well. The initial letters from Kiselev included a list of suggested exhibits, but left the respondent wide discretion in choosing materials to submit. Levshin followed up with letters making more specific requests: reindeer hides from Arkhangelsk, oats from Vilna, rye from Vologda, honey from Kazan, camel wool from Orenburg. Levshin and Kiselev were attempting to create a broad and varied exhibit of Russia’s agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry to which anyone, from reindeer-herders to landed gentry, could contribute.16 The Ministry of State Domains’ campaign for exhibits elicited a gamut of responses from disinterest, to dutiful obedience, to enthusiasm. Troubled by the problem of competition, some regional officials and private land-owners expressed doubts to Levshin that anything from their fields or workshops was worth sending to a world capital like London.17 Others out of obligation, but at times quite competently, began collecting materials to contribute to Russia’s exhibit. Enthusiastic responses arrived from select provincial land-owners and from the Moscow Agricultural Society. Society members took a keen interest in the Exhibition and offered to assist the Ministry by receiving and selecting exhibits that would create a unified representation of Russian agriculture.

15 Ibid., ll. 51, 53, 55–6, 58. 16 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850a, ll. 43–98. 17 Ibid., ll. 129, 212–15.

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Levshin was not deterred by the lukewarm responses he received. He prodded the Ministry’s educational farm managers and regional chamber heads to produce materials for the Exhibition. Although regional officials had responded with doubts about the quality of materials they could send, they dutifully provided Levshin with lists of produce that fitted Kiselev’s requests. Ordering from these lists, Levshin began to assemble an exhibit complemented by the contributions from enthusiastic private land-owners and agricultural societies. Nonetheless, neither Levshin’s hard work nor the avid responses to participate in the Exhibition revealed evidence of a conceptually unified plan to represent a specific image of Russian agriculture to a European audience. In the government’s announcements about the Exhibition, the idea that exhibits should acquaint foreigners with Russian produce and goods was undermined by ambiguous signals over whether or not they should also be competitive on the world market. The Moscow Society of Agriculture took the initiative to resolve this problem and enthusiastically offered its services to the Ministry of State Domains. The Moscow Society of Agriculture, the central organ of the empire’s agricultural societies, responded immediately to Kiselev’s request for voluntary associations to contribute to Russia’s exhibit in London. In fact, the Moscow Society had taken the initiative to get involved in the Exhibition before the government had announced Russia’s participation in the world’s fair. In February of 1850, the Society resolved to contact its members in all the provinces and request agricultural items for the Great Exhibition. In April 1850, Society President Stepan Maslov asked Kiselev directly to allow the Society ‘to prepare, arrange, describe and pack all the items that it deemed worthy to be at the world’s fair’. In a follow-up letter two weeks later, Maslov continued to make the case for the Society’s involvement, in which he stressed the need for conceptual unity in Russia’s exhibit. He argued that all the disparate items that would be submitted must be connected by a unifying idea. Without conceptual cohesion, Maslov cautioned, how will European landowners perceive Russian produce or compare it to that of English farmers?18 Kiselev did not respond. Maslov decided to take the initiative. The Moscow Society announced in the Moscow News, the Journal of Agriculture, and a separate brochure that was sent to members of agricultural and other societies around the empire that it had formed a special six-member committee to organize exhibits for Russia’s display at the London Exhibition. The Society committee explained that it would appeal to the curiosity and research interests of ‘enlightened European agronomists’ by presenting, in a scientific way, the variety of soils, crops and agricultural practices in Russia. The special committee asked for volunteers from around the empire to submit an example of soil – from the black earth regions, the steppe, or the sandy earth of the north – along with examples of crops grown in that particular soil and models of the equipment 18 Ibid., ll. 99–100, 107.

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or machinery used to farm in those regions. The Society committee members believed that such an exhibit would demonstrate Russia’s distinctiveness from Europe and appeal to the interests of European specialists in agronomy, geology and chemistry, as well as to the more practical land-owners who would take interest in the simplicity of Russian farming methods.19 Unlike any of the officials associated with the Imperial Commission, members of the Moscow Society of Agriculture conceived of a unified exhibit that would celebrate Russia’s agricultural riches, strive to improve export trade, and appeal to a broad foreign public. The Society had succeeded better than any other organization in finding a way for agricultural Russia to respond to the intentions of the Great Exhibition’s organizers. Although the Exhibition’s prospectus emphasized machinery, manufactures and innovation, the Society sought to represent Russia as a powerful producer of agricultural goods without any apologies about an inability to compete with European industry. However, the president of the Imperial Commission showed little interest in the Society’s proposal. He appreciated the Society’s efforts to encourage land-owners to participate in the Exhibition, but he reserved for the Imperial Commission alone the right to choose exhibits for display. In short, Russia’s exhibit organizers welcomed the Moscow Society’s logistical support, but not its intellectual expertise.20 Additionally, officials from the Ministry of State Domains were responsible for configuring Russia’s agricultural exhibit, and the Society’s offer infringed on their role. To the disservice of Russia’s display, no one on the Imperial Commission or at the Ministry of State Domains was willing to compromise their official authority and allow the Moscow Society an active, collaborative role in preparing for the Great Exhibition. While officials at the Ministries of State Domains and Finance continued to organize Russia’s exhibit, little assistance or interest was forthcoming from other government institutions except when they were appealed to directly for exhibits. The Ministry of the Imperial Court was asked to contribute examples of decorative art pieces produced at the Imperial factories specializing in porcelain, lapidary and cut stone. For the most part, the Minister of the Imperial Court delegated the choice of items to a subordinate. Foreign Minister Nesselrode asked Count Fedor Tolstoi, Vice-President of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, to take responsibility for organizing a collection of Russian art for the Exhibition. Tolstoi, a medalist and sculptor, made repeated requests to his fellow professors and academicians, who responded with silence or terse notes that they had nothing to send. Consequently, Count Tolstoi was the sole member of the Academy to represent Russia at the Exhibition.21 It is not clear why Russia’s artists chose not to participate in the Great Exhibition. Tolstoi apparently submitted his own work out of a sense of obligation and pressure from his superiors. Other Academy members evidently saw no benefit in the exposure of their work, even though many of them were educated in Europe. 19 Priglashenie gg. chlenam, pp. 17–19. 20 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850a, ll. 145, 165–8. 21 RGIA, f. 789, op. 2, d. 44, ll. 1–9, 11–16, 17–22, 30–31, 32–7.

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Perhaps they, like uninterested agriculturists and manufacturers, refused to participate because they worried that their European colleagues might regard their works as inferior. By early September 1850, the Imperial Commission had begun preparing exhibits for shipment to England. Approximately 376 exhibitors contributed materials for Russia’s display in London.22 Individual exhibitors represented a variety of social groups from nobles to peasants, although the Church and clergy did not participate. Contributors included well-known industrialists, like the Demidov brothers, whose display of malachite decorative objects dominated Russia’s display, and a variety of ordinary agriculturists, state officials, merchants, military officers, Cossacks and serfs. Apart from state institutions, exhibits were also submitted in the name of collective entities such as regional agricultural societies, Cossack hosts, military settlements or, quite simply, entire provinces. While the Imperial Commission refused very few objects, it did reject exhibits considered too odd to put on display. Commissioners turned down the offer of an unusually large ear of rye, since it departed from their policy to send only ordinary produce of the highest quality rather than tricks of nature.23 Similarly, the works of a peasant-mechanic who skilfully turned iron and wood into items from agricultural machinery to wall clocks were dismissed as ‘hardly worth sending to … the exhibition’. Commissioners encouraged the submission of competitive items such as wheat and sheep skins rather than the unique or idiosyncratic.24 In London, Gavril Kamenskii, the Russian Commissioner to the Exhibition, and Baron Filip Brunnov, the Russian Ambassador, reviewed the list of items gathered by the Imperial Commission for display at the Great Exhibition and communicated their concerns to superiors with regard to how such a collection would be interpreted by a British audience. In early February, Kamenskii advised the Imperial Commission that the materials from the Urals state factories created the wrong impression of Russia. The exhibits, he explained, ‘might be interesting for specialists but this … collection will not be appreciated as it should be by the majority of the public … the artillery shells, in particular, could even give cause for inappropriate and unseemly remarks from the free, entirely unrestrained journalists who serve as the mouthpiece of the English public, and who are ever hostile to foreigners’. Was it appropriate, Kamenskii asked, to display works which ‘convey neither progress nor

22 Russia was among the top ten countries at the Great Exhibition in numbers of exhibitors. Great Britain and its colonies, with 6861 participants, accounted for nearly half of the 14 thousand total number of exhibitors. France followed with 1560 exhibitors, Austria – 647, the United States – 599, Belgium – 512, Russia – 376, Spain – 300, Switzerland - 278, Italy – 277, and Portugal – 264. Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and Anne Rasmussen, Les Fastes du Progres: Le guide des Expositions universelles, 1851– 1992 (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), pp. 58–60. 23 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850a, ll. 247–8. 24 Ibid., ll. 164, 193–4.

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refinement in industry?’ The Commission deferred judgement to Fullon at the Mining Department, who asserted that the raw materials from the Urals ‘could not be uninteresting to an educated public’, and argued that the bombs, grenades, shot and shell were intended as examples of Russian founding and casting. Despite the possible rebuke of journalists, Fullon was sure that the exhibits would be appreciated by unbiased experts at the Exhibition.25 At the same time, Brunnov wrote to Foreign Minister Nesselrode with conflicted thoughts regarding Russia’s reputation and the Exhibition. On the one hand, the Ambassador warned that the Imperial Commission had failed to assemble an exhibit that showed Russia in the best possible light. Brunnov was struck that government institutions had contributed more exhibits than private manufacturers. This, he thought, would fail to demonstrate to a foreign audience the vitality and ingenuity of Russian manufacturing. On the other hand, Brunnov asserted that a lacklustre display in no way threatened to diminish Russia’s innate ‘national grandeur’. In the Ambassador’s opinion, the Exhibition would be little more than a modern Babylon of competing steam engines and commercial manufactures from England and France. Like Nesselrode, Brunnov understood Russia’s participation as an honorary gesture undertaken for the sake of international goodwill. Since Russia could not compete with the industrializing economies of Great Britain, France or Belgium, it did not matter greatly what the tsarist empire sent to the Exhibition, as long as it took part in an honourable way. Brunnov dismissed the criticism of the Russian exhibit that he knew was forthcoming in the foreign press and from Russians themselves. The press was poorly disposed towards Russia in the first place, Brunnov noted, and Russia’s greatness was simply unassailable, especially by journalists. Brunnov argued that Russian visitors to the Exhibition should understand that their country had nothing to envy regarding European industrial development. One does not judge national prosperity by the value of merchandise it produces, Brunnov offered. Russian visitors will understand, he hoped, that commercial success is not worth the price of the misery that reigns in the workshops of Manchester and Birmingham, or the unstable political atmosphere endured by France for fifty years.26 In the autumn and spring of 1850–51, readers of the Moscow News and the St Petersburg News followed the construction of Joseph Paxton’s iron and glass design for the Exhibition building and the growing expectations for the world’s fair as the opening day drew nearer. As a service to readers who might plan to visit the Exhibition, both Russian papers printed travel guide information, including advice on ‘the art of living cheaply in London’ and making acquaintances in British society.27 In related articles, the papers commented on the dangers of thievery and pick-pocketing along with information on the security measures being taken by the British to prevent crime and social unrest. 25 RGIA. f. 37, op. 1, d. 289, ll. 205–7. 26 Ibid., f. 560, op. 22, d. 84, ll. 50–58. 27 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 26 September 1850, pp. 1215–16; and SanktPeterburgskie Vedomosti, 5 April 1851, pp. 309–11.

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Of the six million visitors to the Exhibition, Russian fair-goers presumably numbered in the hundreds.28 Officials from the Ministries of State Domains and Finance were dispatched to make detailed observations of foreign exhibits and to purchase machinery, equipment, seeds, and other materials. Other visitors included exhibitors and private individuals with the means to travel. Among them were Modest Kittary, a young professor from the University at Kazan, and land-owner Aleksandr Koshelev. They were joined by Grand Duke Mikhail, members of the St Petersburg Yacht Club, and others. The regular reports and correspondence from a number of these visitors provided Russian readers back home with a variety of vicarious visits to the Exhibition. The Great Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851 in a ceremony presided over by the British Royal Commissioners and attended by Queen Victoria, her court, government ministers, the foreign diplomatic corps, and 25 thousand guests. Rumours that the opening would be delayed did not come to pass, even though many of the more than 100 thousand exhibits were not yet installed. Paxton’s iron, glass and wood Exhibition building, the Crystal Palace, attracted as much attention as any of the materials on display. Exhibits from Great Britain and its colonies occupied the area west of the building’s central transept. The twenty-five foreign countries in attendance displayed their exhibits in national sections east of the transept. The four galleries of Russia’s section, two on either side of the main aisle, neighboured the United States on the east and the exhibits of pre-unification Germany on the west. Like France, the United States, and many other foreign exhibitors, Russia’s display was largely incomplete on opening day. The shipment from Odessa and one shipment from St Petersburg had arrived in the autumn of 1850. A second shipment from St Petersburg was delayed by ice in the Baltic Sea, and a third shipment had not even set sail for London. The malachite doors, fireplace and other decorative pieces from the Demidovs’ factory were not yet crated. They were on display for visitors in the Demidov St Petersburg home during the first two weeks of the Great Exhibition, and did not reach London until late May.29 Queen Victoria visited the foreign section of the Crystal Palace on the morning of 19 May. She found ‘the North German section … meagrely represented … Russia … almost entirely empty … America … certainly not very interesting’.30 The Russian Commissioner, Gavril Kamenskii, performed most of the work installing Russia’s collection. He had expert help once representatives from the

28 The official attendance figure for the Great Exhibition, 6,039,195, represents numerous repeat visitors. There is no official number of Russian visitors to the Exhibition. British customs reported that 854 Russians visited England during the fiveand-a-half months of the Exhibition. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, vol. 4 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851–52), p. 114. 29 Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 26 April 1851, p. 365. 30 Quoted in C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 54.

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Ministries of State Domains and Finance joined him in London. Egor Peterson, a specialist in forestry, arrived in London in late April and began setting up the agricultural displays. Aleksandr Sherer, a textiles specialist, arrived near the end of May and threw himself into arranging the displays of Russian manufactures. Although Russia had a partial display in place for opening day, Kamenskii closed the exhibit to the public when the steamship Neptune arrived in the Thames with another shipment of Russian materials near the end of May. Behind curtains hung to block the public’s view, Kamenskii and his colleagues worked from seven in the morning to nine at night unpacking cases and installing exhibits. As the only area of the Crystal Palace closed off to the public, the Russian section attracted significant curiosity, and was inundated with visitors when it reopened on Saturday, 7 June.31 Like most of the foreign sections in the Crystal Palace, Russia’s Exhibition space was divided by the building’s main aisle into two halves. Machinery, manufactures and fine arts were on the north side of the aisle, while raw materials were on the south side. The raw materials gallery was divided into four areas. The first included textiles, from silks to chintz and yarn, displayed in glass cases. In the second section, examples of hemp, flax, hides, leather and felting were arranged along the walls facing a pyramid of agricultural produce in the centre. Products of Russian mines, from ores to ingots, filled the third space. The fourth section was devoted to chemical products. In the main aisle between Russia’s raw materials and manufactures stood two large bronze pedestals made by the Demidovs and intended to support copies of Klodt’s equestrian statues, which did not arrive until late June. The northern section of Russia’s space consisted of one large room hung with pomegranate-red cloth. Pieces from the Demidovs’ malachite factory were on display in the room’s centre along with porcelains, mosaics and other objets d’art from the imperial factories and private craftsmen. Along the sides of the rooms, galvanized medals designed by Count Tolstoi, tools, cutlery, and other odds and ends were displayed on tables. Examples of decorative paper, ornamental arms and parquetry hung on the walls. Ten-foot tall, bronze candelabra stood alongside the columns at the entryway. At the back of the gallery, along an open corridor, machinery for making sails and boiling sugar was on display, along with three simple carriages and two sleighs. Like the other foreign countries, Russia also had space on the second-floor gallery for lightweight items, where furs, mohair, shawls, lace and other miscellaneous items were displayed in three cases.32 Both Commissioner Kamenskii and Ambassador Brunnov had expressed concern regarding how Russia would be perceived by the British public at the Exhibition. Their concerns were well grounded in an understanding of the cultural and political stereotypes of Russian barbarism and despotism that prevailed in England. At the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the cordial 31 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850b, ll. 128–9; and Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 7 June 1851, pp. 501–3, and 12 June 1851, pp. 517–19. 32 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850b, ll. 382–7.

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alliance between Russia and Great Britain was recast as rivalry between the two most powerful victors. Between 1815 and 1841, Russophobia was commonplace in British foreign policy and the press. Economic ties had worsened between the two countries due to protective tariffs in each. Travel accounts grew in popularity after 1815, and continued to portray Russians as depraved nobles, miserable serfs and corrupt officials. Nicholas I was particularly vilified as a tyrant who oppressed the Poles and held territorial ambitions reaching to British India. In sum, the politically alert and literate public in Britain could not ignore the spirit of anti-Russian hostility that prevailed in England.33 Between 1841 and the onset of the Crimean War in 1853, anti-Russian material in the British press diminished, although Russophobia did not. Travel literature that spoke to British stereotypes continued to appear, most notably Custine’s Russia in 1839. Custine’s work sold well, but drew attacks from reviewers in western Europe in part because of personal dislike for Custine as well as for the book’s many factual inaccuracies. The author of an essay in the Edinburgh Review demonstrated, however, that disparaging Russia was still the norm in Great Britain. The anonymous author criticized Custine for describing Russian society and government as deficient European forms rather than as typical Asian counterparts, and by implication naturally servile and despotic.34 The Exhibition offered the British opportunities to continue this type of criticism. On 7 June 1851, the day the Russian section re-opened to the public, the Illustrated London News published on its front page a lengthy essay that described Russia as the very antithesis of ‘the spiritual idea of progress and improvement’ that prevailed in Britain. Russia and the antagonistic principle of ‘conservative absolutism’, the essayist argued, stood opposed to Britain and ‘the principle of change for the better’. Britain’s Crystal Palace represented the industrial spirit ascendant in western Europe, according to the Illustrated London News, and garnered the sympathy ‘of all those who have faith in humanity and indulge in the hope that the manifold evils which afflict it are capable of much diminution, if not of eradication’. In the East, however, the journal warned, Nicholas I is spreading ‘the military, the anti-democratic and anti-industrial principle … into the very heart of Europe’. In conclusion, the journal cast Britain’s ideal of progress as the principle bound to prevail over Russian militarism.35 Nicholas I agreed to the proposal that Russia participate in the Exhibition, in part, to influence foreign public opinion. Russia’s exhibit organizers prepared a visual display of materials that represented Russian husbandry, 33 John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 277–89. 34 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 35 ‘The Old and New Holy Alliance’, Illustrated London News, 18/491 (1851), pp. 503–4.

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craftsmanship and ingenuity. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses might have been, the exhibit at the Crystal Palace was the first opportunity Russians had to project their own image of Russia to a broad European public. Visitors to the Crystal Palace, who, perhaps, like French journalist Alexis de Valon, felt that they neither knew nor understood Russia, inundated the exhibit. The public so crowded the Russian section when it re-opened in June that the London correspondent of the St Petersburg News failed to work his way into the northern gallery and decided to postpone his review for several days until he could properly view the exhibits.36 British correspondents had better luck, and quickly published reviews that praised the exquisite beauty of Russian ornamental pieces and objets d’art while simultaneously criticizing the system that produced them. At the Great Exhibition, a formal interpretation of Russia’s exhibits was never far removed from political and social editorializing. Among the Russian items, the Demidovs’ malachite vases, drawing-room doors and furniture created the greatest sensation. Their beauty could not be exaggerated, according to The Times.37 The Illustrated London News imagined that only a ‘fairy palace’ could be furnished with such a pair of doors made from ‘brilliant green … malachite, with its curled waviness like the pattern of watered silk, and its perfectly polished surface … heightened by the … burnished gold of the paneling and ornaments’.38 Gilt-bronze candelabra by Krumbigel’s Moscow manufactory were deemed ‘impossible to excel’.39 Exuberant praise characterized an ebony case decorated with precious stones in a mosaic relief of fruit. The Times regarded this contribution from the Imperial Lapidary Works at Peterhof as ‘one of the chief wonders of the exhibition’.40 Numerous publications reported that the Prince of Wales found the bunch of currants depicted in amethyst on the case’s lid so life-like that he would eat them if he could. On the southern side of the nave, Russia’s raw materials could not compete for attention with the luxurious items in the northern gallery. However, the products of the mines and fields were not poorly received as much as they were simply ignored. The British press found the grains, ores and other produce equally ‘important’ and ‘unattractive’. 41 Although the average visitor and journalist might have bypassed Russia’s display of raw materials in favour of the treasures nearby, specialists in agriculture and mining praised the high quality of the metals, leather and grains on display. The formal characteristics of Russia’s varied exhibits elicited both awe and polite indifference from the British press. Journalists, nonetheless, were not at a loss to link fine craftsmanship, raw material production and even carriage design to Russian despotism, slavery and militarism. The Times correspondent observed ‘with a pang of sorrow’ that such time and labour was 36 37 38 39 40 41

Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 12 June 1851, pp. 517–19. The Times, 9 June 1851, p. 8. ‘The Russian Court’, Illustrated London News, 18/496 (1851), p. 597. Illustrated London News, 19/515 (1851), p. 304. The Times, 9 June 1851, p. 8. Illustrated London News, 19/505 (1851), p. 127.

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devoted to the artistic form of the malachite manufactures and the ‘theatrical properties of a vast empire’ rather than to the development of raw materials and manufactures that are of ‘real importance and permanent interest’.42 An Illustrated London News correspondent pointed out to readers the ‘curious and suggestive’ juxtaposition of the neighbouring Russian and American sections – ‘pure despotism side by side with perfect self-government’. Russia’s exhibits prove the point, the News correspondent asserted. The gallery of magnificent luxury items comprised ‘a brilliant museum of … Royal toys’ rather than the machines and manufactures of an industrializing and entrepreneurial society. The News correspondent mused that Nicholas was opposed to free trade because it ‘might produce inconveniently pacific tendencies in his landowning nobles’, and concluded that Russia’s system of government stands in the way of its own prosperity.43 Denigrating foreign exhibits, like that of Russia, allowed the British to shape their own national identity by defining what they were not.44 Commentary from the British press on Russia served to express anxieties over constitutional government and imperial expansion. The press looked to the Exhibition for proof that entrepreneurship and industrial progress were the products of a free society and would, in the end, prevail over absolutism and militarism. To further make the point that Russia was outside of the European mainstream, the press promoted the general impression that Russia’s most popular and aesthetically attractive exhibits in the northern gallery could not have been made by Russians at all. ‘In St. Petersburg’, asserted one typical journalist, ‘almost all work of fine art or taste is in the hands or under the direction of foreigners’.45 Commentary in the British press diminished Russian workmanship by denying the existence of Russian talent. Negative press coverage angered the Russians. In addition to the criticism published by The Times and the London Illustrated News, the Morning Chronicle censured the Russian section for displaying the excesses of tsarist luxury. Commissioners from the Ministry of Finance exclaimed in response, ‘how difficult it is to satisfy everyone’s tastes … especially journalists’! They give our fine arts their full due but find the works too attractive, too enormous and intended only to decorate imperial palaces instead of the homes of private persons’.46 Although Ambassador Brunnov instructed Kamenskii to respond directly to the Morning Chronicle, the Russians had little recourse against bad press.47 For the most part, Russian visitors and editors of newspapers

42 The Times, 9 June 1851, p. 8. 43 ‘The Contributions of Russia’, Illustrated London News, 19/505 (1851), p. 127. 44 Jeffrey A. Auerbach makes this argument in The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 45 ‘The Contributions of Russia’, Illustrated London News, 19/505 (1851), p. 127. 46 Leontii Markovich Samoilov and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Sherer, Obozrenie Londonskoi vsemirnoi vystavki po glavneishim otrasliam manufakturnoi promyshlennosti (St Petersburg: Tip. Departamenta vneshnei torgovli, 1852), p. 191. 47 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850b, ll. 143–4.

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and journals back home ignored the British editorializing and emphasized the popularity of the Russian section with the crowds in the Crystal Palace. Russian newspapers and journals carried extensive coverage of the Great Exhibition. They brought the world’s fair home to their readers by printing reports from their own correspondents and letters from visitors to London, and frequently borrowing from the foreign press and one another. When the editors of Rays of Light attempted to sum up the Exhibition, they noted that it had been so exhaustively written about ‘in all the newspapers and journals’ and so thoroughly discussed in almost ‘every circle of society’ that readers were undoubtedly already well informed.48 When the Exhibition first opened, Russian periodicals borrowed their coverage primarily from the British press. Russian editors omitted disparaging editorializing from reprints and offered readers the praise and compliments that remained. Journals reprinted favourable coverage of Russia that particularly spoke to the interests of their readers. The Contemporary quoted a Morning Post article in which the Demidovs’ malachite furnishings were lauded not for their beauty, but for evidence of capital accumulation in the hands of manufacturers and thus Russian sympathy with the Western ideals of industrial progress exemplified by the Exhibition.49 The journal of the Imperial Free Economic Society quoted the Morning Chronicle’s praise for Russia’s display of grains and grasses as ‘truly the best and most complete exhibit of its kind at the exhibition’.50 Once reports and letters began arriving on editors’ desks from Russians in London, readers had the opportunity to experience the Exhibition through their compatriots’ travelogues. Thanks to the descriptions penned by travellers, Russian readers vicariously sailed to London, admired the Crystal Palace while strolling through Hyde Park, and spent days examining exhibits, other visitors and the Russian section. Baron Gustav Fel’kerzam, a Baltic land-owner and an active member of agricultural and other societies, edited his correspondence with friends who were visiting the Great Exhibition for publication in the Moscow News. Like many other visitors, Baron Fel’kerzam’s friends marvelled at Paxton’s Crystal Palace and described it in the most panegyric tones: ‘We are astounded by the building’s colossal but nonetheless harmonious proportions, its illumination and lightness, its strength and severe simplicity and its beauty and usefulness’.51 Georg Min, a Russian Anglophile, added that one must positively spend some time in the Crystal Palace to get a sense of its enormity and staggering dimensions. Inside, the Crystal Palace had a fairy-tale effect on the visitor, Min explained. ‘Under the transept especially, you forget that there is a roof overhead; trees, fountains, flower beds and statues … contribute to the deception that you are 48 Londonskaia vsemirnaia vystavka. (St Petersburg: Tip. Shtaba otdel’n. Korpusa Vnutren. Strazhi., 1851), p. 1. 49 ‘O Londonskoi vystavke’, Sovremennik, 28/2 (1851), Otd. 6, 30. 50 ‘Kollektsiia rastenii myzy ligovo na vsemirnoi vystavke’, Trudy Vol’nago Ekonomicheskago Obshchestva 3/7 (1851), pribavleniia, 17. 51 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 16 June 1851, p. 647.

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52

in a garden under the open sky’. Not every Russian visitor was so impressed. The ever-practical professor Kittary evaluated the building carefully and criticized it to readers back home. The professor explained that the British certainly deserved the praise heaped upon them for the Crystal Palace, but only ‘as an example of the riches of private capital, domestic produce and workmanship’. As an exhibition building for a world’s fair, Kittary found the Crystal Palace wanting. Its glass roof provided only partial protection from the rain and sun, the wooden floor was in poor condition, and the building’s ventilation system did little to diminish the dust and humidity that threatened to damage the exhibits.53 Novelist Fedor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man railed against the modern world the Crystal Palace represented and the utopian dreams it inspired.54 The Underground Man fumes that the rationality embodied by the Crystal Palace threatens to reduce human behaviour to a set of predictable, tabulated schedules. ‘Everything will be accurately calculated and specified so that there’ll be no more actions or adventures left on earth’. Life in the Crystal Palace, the Underground Man predicts, will be ‘extremely rational’ and ‘terribly boring’.55 Even though Dostoevsky never visited the Crystal Palace, its imagery was so pervasive in Russia that it was readily used as a literary metaphor by a number of authors who had never seen the Exhibition with their own eyes.56 52 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 8 September 1851, p. 1008. 53 Modest Iakovlevich Kittary, Londonskaia vsemirnaia vystavka. Dnevnik russkogo puteshestvenika (St Petersburg: 1851), pp. 16–18. This publication originally appeared in Otechestvennye Zapiski, 77, 78, 79 (1851). 54 So voluminous was the Russian outpouring of reportage, feuilletons and critical commentary on the first world’s fair that Ekaterina Dianina has identified the formation of a veritable ‘Crystal Palace canon’. The canon created an ‘imagined “Russian Crystal Palace”’ that was used as a literary device by writers like Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What is to be Done?), Fedor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground), and Ivan Turgenev (Smoke) for addressing concerns about modernity, progress and Russian identity. See ‘Dostoevskii v khrustal’nom dvortse’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 57 (2002), at http:// magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2002/57/. Dostoevsky is responding here to Chernyshevsky’s imagined crystal palace which appears fleetingly in the dreams of the heroine of What is to be Done?, a novel about political emancipation that provided inspiration to radicals from the nihilists of the 1860s to the Bolsheviks of 1917. 55 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. and ed. Michael Katz (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), pp. 17–18. 56 Although neither Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky nor Turgenev visited the original Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, each author was acquainted with metropolitan London. Chernyshevsky visited the reconstructed Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1859. Dostoevsky and Turgenev visited London during the 1862 International Exhibition, which was held in an ill-designed building at Kensington Park. Dostoevsky attended the 1862 Exhibition, but Dianina speculates that he did not visit the Sydenham site of the reconstructed Crystal Palace; pp. 26–7. Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank errs by conflating Paxton’s Crystal Palace at Sydenham with the 1862 building at Kensington Park. See Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 239.

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According to many who attended the Exhibition, entering the Crystal Palace was a disorienting experience. Aleksandr Koshelev spent six hours just walking the main aisles and taking in the sights without setting foot into more than one of the Exhibition galleries. Baron Fel’kerzam’s friends noted that the more time you spent in the Crystal Palace, the more lost you became and the more incapable of deciding at which exhibits to stop and take a look.57 Professor Kittary set out in his scientific way to examine the exhibits according to the official classification system. ‘All too frequently’, he grumbled, ‘the objects of one and the same class are placed in different locations, some upstairs, some down, some at one end, others in the opposite direction’. Spectacle had trumped the goal of education promised by the use of a classification system. ‘Conspicuous, eye-catching exhibits were placed front and center’, Kittary observed, ‘while the plain, but no less interesting, ones were hidden back in the corners’. Rather than a world’s fair, the professor concluded, the Crystal Palace offered the visitor a ‘world of chaos’.58 The attractions of the Russian section certainly proved Kittary’s point about the importance of spectacle at the Exhibition. Nonetheless, Russia’s commissioners had succeeded in organizing the exhibits for show without significantly abandoning the Exhibition’s categorization scheme. Georg Min enthused with national pride and wry insight that Russia’s exhibits ‘astounded everyone, not because nothing better was to be found, but because they did not expect anything like this from Muscovians’.59 Min’s italicized emphasis, referring to medieval Muscovy rather than imperial Russia, reveals his understanding of the stereotypes held by Europeans who imagined the tsarist empire as unchanged since English merchantmen landed on the shores of the White Sea in the sixteenth century. Officials from the Ministries of Finance and State Domains, as well as private visitors, felt that Russian agriculture and industry were adequately represented at the Exhibition, challenging old stereotypes even if they did not sparkle like the luxury items. Nonetheless, they regretted that the representation of Russia was incomplete and created some false impressions. Leontii Samoilov and Aleksandr Sherer, specialists in textiles who were dispatched to the Exhibition by the Ministry of Finance, served on the international juries of experts judging exhibits and recommending awards. They spent months in London setting up the Russian display, meeting the crowds in the Russian section, and examining the other national displays. Encouraged by the praise of foreign specialists for Russia’s raw materials and the attention to objets d’art by European royalty and the general public, Samoilov and Sherer took up the ‘pleasant obligation’ of acquainting their compatriots at home

57 Aleksandr Ivanovich Koshelev, Poezdka russkogo zemledel’tsa v Angliiu i na Vsemirnuiu vystavku (Moscow: tip. Aleksandra Semena, 1852), pp. 17–19; Moskovskie Vedomosti, 19 June 1851, p. 656. 58 Kittary, pp. 31–2; and Auerbach, p. 95. 59 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 1 November 1851, p. 1257.

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‘with the true state of Russia’s representation’ at the world’s fair: where it excelled, fell short, and where it was misunderstood by foreigners.60 Samoilov and Sherer concluded that Russia made a worthy representation of its agricultural and industrial production at the Exhibition, despite a variety of difficulties and shortcomings. They judged Russia’s display in the northern and southern galleries based on their knowledgeable understanding of the country’s current industrial state rather than by comparison to the more industrially advanced states of Europe. Samoilov and Sherer pointed to the well-received display of Russian fabrics – from simple wool cloth to the rich brocades admired by even Lyonnais manufacturers – as evidence against Russia’s detractors at the Exhibition, who asserted that Russian manufactures catered only to the tsarist family and upper class. Conversely, the Russian officials noted that criticism from foreigners was well deserved for the ‘very weak’ showing of carriages, the absence of anything ‘remarkable’ in the machinery class, and the unrepresentatively small display of fine Russian leather. These examples created a misleading impression of the state of Russian industry, Samoilov and Sherer complained. ‘There’s no doubt’, they wrote reproachfully, ‘that if our manufacturers from all areas of industry had participated in the … exhibition, then certain newspaper correspondents would have had no grounds … to criticize us’.61 Samoilov and Sherer captured the most prevalent opinion among Russian visitors to the Exhibition. Russia had been presented in a worthy fashion not because it demonstrated an ability to compete on the world market as an industrial and commercial power, but because the exhibits represented Russia to the world as a place rich in natural resources that were utilized by an original, clever and artistic people.62 In December 1851, Iurii Gagemeister, an official of the Ministry of State Domains recently returned from the Exhibition, asked, ‘what benefit might Russia derive from the London world’s fair?’ ‘The question has probably been posed by many’, he continued, ‘but it has hardly received a satisfactory answer’.63 Samoilov and Sherer offered that Russia’s honour had been defended against foreign slurs. Different officials took a more practical point of view and attempted to compile a detailed study of the Exhibition that would benefit Russia’s manufacturers and agriculturists. Others who had visited the Crystal Palace argued that Russians should look inward for a solution to their relative lack of prosperity.

60 Leontii Samoilov and Aleksandr Sherer, ‘Vzgliad na Russkoe otdelenie’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 26 July 1851, p. 817. This article appeared in a number of periodicals: Kommercheskaia Gazeta (July 1851); Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 26 July 1851, pp. 661–3, and 27 July 1851, pp. 665–6; Zhurnal Manufaktur i Torgovli, 4–5 (1851), pp. 265–90; and was included in their published final report on the Exhibition, Obozrenie Londonskoi vsemirnoi vystavki po glavneishim otrasliam manufakturnoi promyshlennosti (St Petersburg: Tip. Departamenta vneshnei torgovli, 1852). 61 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 26 July 1851, p. 816. 62 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 31 July 1851, p. 837. 63 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850b, l. 408.

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Russian participation in the Exhibition had in part been motivated by a desire to make Russia more accurately known to Europeans. There was no attempt to address the political criticism of Russia and Nicholas I. At stake in the Exhibition was the question of Russia’s honour and status among European states. For the most part, Russian observers agreed with Samoilov and Sherer that Russia had done a worthy and respectable job of presenting itself to the world in the language of industry and agriculture that informed the Exhibition. ‘In many regards’, Georg Min reported from London, ‘Russia astounded … Europeans … at the Crystal Palace’.64 His assertion was borne out in the awards won by Russian exhibitors: three council medals, 60 prize medals and 67 honorable mentions. The percentage of Russia’s exhibitors who received an award, approximately one-third, compared favourably with the top ten foreign participants after France.65 The awards confirmed the opinions of officials like Ambassador Brunnov and Mining Department Director Fullon, who believed that judicious and unbiased observers at the Exhibition would recognize Russia’s intrinsic merit and stature. Although Samoilov and Sherer underscored Russia’s honourable showing at the Great Exhibition, they conceded that Russian industry failed to show items in areas where it enjoyed progress and success. Eduard Lode, an official in the Department of Agriculture, disagreed with the rosy evaluation of Russia’s participation. He emphasized the criticisms that observers had consistently sounded. With few exceptions, Lode reported, Russia was poorly represented by the agricultural and industrial exhibits sent to London. He blamed potential exhibitors who had not comprehended the significance or meaning of the Exhibition and had wrongly decided not to take part.66 Consequently, an accurate portrayal of Russia for a foreign audience had been obscured by a display combining overwhelming glitter and uninteresting mediocrity. Aleksandr Koshelev added, with regret, that ‘we shone in the luxury department as if we were ashamed to show our real, everyday way of life’. Where were the samovars?, he wondered.67 Why indeed had Russia failed to show its everyday face in London? There may not have been a ‘complete picture’ of Russia in London, but Lode’s assertion that his compatriots failed to understand the benefit of an exhibition does not hold up in light of the success enjoyed by the Free Economic Society’s agricultural exhibition held in St Petersburg in September 1850. The Free Economic Society exhibition ran for ten days and concluded at the same time that Russia’s Imperial Commission was preparing exhibits for shipment to London. The Society’s exhibition was an innovation in many respects for Russia, where industrial and agricultural exhibitions had become established in the 1840s. The first agricultural exhibit in Russia to invite participants from all 64 Moskovskie Vedomosti, 1 November 1851, p. 1257. 65 Samoilov and Sherer, pp. 201–12. A complete list of award winners was widely published in the Russian press. 66 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850v, ll. 88–9. 67 Koshelev, p. 19.

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across the empire, the exhibition was also the first national agricultural event organized by a voluntary association. The Society backed the enterprise with ten thousand roubles from its own coffers, and secured the blessing of the Ministry of State Domains for the exhibition as well as the imperial government’s sanction. Through a network of provincial, auxiliary organizing committees, the Society received three thousand items to put on public display, including livestock, raw and refined agricultural produce, farming equipment and machinery, as well as models of mills, peasant houses, carts and so on. The exhibit made a profound impression on the correspondent from the St Petersburg News: ‘Never before have we beheld such a complete picture of those riches that have made our land great and bountiful since ancient times’.68 Why many of the elements of this ‘complete picture’ of Russia failed to appear in London is not clear. The vast majority of exhibitors at the successful national Exhibition felt that their materials were simply not competitive enough on the world market. For the most part, there was simply insufficient economic incentive for exhibitors to send their produce, machinery or models to faraway London. Additionally, the emphasis of the Great Exhibition on innovation and competition undermined the argument that Russia display itself for the sake of honour or national grandeur. An international exhibition held much less practical value for Russian agricultural producers and manufacturers than a national one that emphasized the noble goals of education rather than petty commercial competition. Attentive Russian visitors observing the Great Exhibition were compelled to look inward for solutions to Russia’s problematic economic and cultural relationship with the West. Gagemeister reported to the Ministry of State Domains that Russia lacked inspiration. The true benefits of the Exhibition for ‘Russians visiting the fair and all of Russia’, Gagemeister argued, were the ‘thoughts and ideas’ arising from the opportunity to compare the works, strengths and trajectory of different peoples and lands. ‘Russia more than any other country in Europe’ should derive this benefit, Gagemeister emphasized, ‘because her powers have not yet awakened. They await a life-giving spirit’. Gagemeister believed that this life-giving spirit was a sense of dedication to competition on the world market. He suggested that the state could animate a spirit of competition by building an improved system of transportation that would allow Russia ‘to finally take its intended place in the industrial world’.69 Competition in the world market constituted one of the goals proposed by officials at the Ministries of State Domains and Finance for Russia’s participation in the Great Exhibition. They hoped to increase Russian exports and open new markets, but the display of Russia’s raw materials in the Crystal Palace failed to serve their purposes. British observers noted exhibits that represented Russia’s longstanding export trade to the island nation – naval stores, particularly – but detected little potential for new trade developments. ‘It is strange’, The Times commented, that after enjoying the ‘extraordinary 68 Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, 19 October 1850, p. 948. 69 RGIA, f. 398, op. 15, d. 4850b, ll. 408, 493.

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opportunity’ to review Russia’s resources, ‘we do not gather many hints for the future calculated to prove extremely valuable and suggestive’.70 Any chance of improved Anglo-Russian trade relations subsequently disappeared in the bellicose atmosphere of 1853. Land-owner Aleksandr Koshelev believed that hard work was the ‘lifegiving spirit’ that would allow Russia to take its rightful place in the world. He asserted that Russia’s relationship to Europe required a new attitude. While viewing architectural models on display in the Crystal Palace, Koshelev found himself standing next to an architect from Russia. To Koshelev’s enthusiasm for British innovations in construction materials and design, the architect responded, ‘there’s nothing new here – we know it all well’. In this phrase ‘we know it all’, Koshelev saw the root of Russia’s debilitating relationship with Western culture. Koshelev rehearsed the argument for his readers that Russians had borrowed the best of European education, manners and dress, and yet remained unenlightened. Labour and an understanding of one’s own culture were the keys to development in science, arts and other areas, he offered. Russia should study the West – not imitate it, but take what is good, and leave the rest behind. Unfortunately, Koshelev complained, … we do exactly the opposite and it is not surprising that we generally produce little in the sciences, in the arts, and in other fields of human endeavor. Most of what we do produce is poor, characterless, and fruitless. Those of us who have received a so-called European education are alien to hard work. We satiate ourselves on the diseased fruits of the ostensible Western Enlightenment without developing our own indigenous, life-giving origins.71

Koshelev did not advocate rejection of the West. Indeed, what better place to study the West than at the world’s fairs that proliferated with increasing grandeur and bombast during the second half of the nineteenth century? The Great Exhibition inaugurated a forum for national expression in an international contest of power and style. Russian officials, professionals and, increasingly, entrepreneurs advocated participation in subsequent world’s fairs with many of the same goals in mind that had motivated the ministers of Nicholas in 1851. Subsequent ministers, who advised later tsars, felt compelled to request funds for participation in exhibitions in order to uphold Russian honour, shape public opinion abroad, and stimulate domestic industry. Pursuit of these goals continued to raise issues that had not been successfully resolved in 1851. Collaboration between government officials and private subjects to create displays remained contested terrain. In the observations of many Russian commentators, the image of the tsarist empire on fairgrounds became increasingly popular with crowds for its ‘exoticism’, while simultaneously representing industry less effectively. Consequently, the desire to make Russia known to Europeans remained unsatisfied and continues to resonate in the present. In 2003, Moscow’s new political and business leaders made a 70 The Times, 9 June 1851, p. 8. 71 Koshelev, pp. 98–9.

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competitive, but unsuccessful, bid to host Expo 2010, a modern-day world’s fair. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, they were motivated by the belief that Russia ‘still remains unknown to the world – in its particularities and possibilities’.72

72 Expo 2010 Russia, at http://www.expo2010Russia.ru/main/rus/location/rus. htm (accessed 2 September 2003).

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Chapter 7

The Great Exhibition and the German States John R. Davis

British Intentions regarding the German States Britain at mid-century was a ‘satiated’ country, and there was remarkably little interest in foreign politics.1 In this respect, France was the only foreign country most Britons cared about. The intricate and perplexing affairs of the 38 German states attracted little attention. Nevertheless, in preparations for the Great Exhibition, the role of the German states was carefully considered. The Society of Arts wished to encourage comparison between British and European goods. German manufactures were particularly important. John Bowring’s influential report of 1840 had highlighted German industrial advances consequent upon the application of superior artistic and, especially, scientific knowledge.2 Benthamites like Henry Cole shared Bowring’s views. Special care was taken to ensure the German states’ support for the Exhibition. John Scott Russell undertook a comprehensive German tour in September 1849.3 With letters of introduction from the Foreign Secretary, acquired at Prince Albert’s request, he visited Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Stettin. On his return, he confirmed German support for the project – in particular from Berlin.4 The German states’ presence also followed on from the adoption of Free Trade in Britain in 1846. In 1834, the Zollverein customs union, led by Prussia, and excluding Austria, had been created. Bowring had argued that this was a defensive reaction to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws. Their abolition now encouraged hopes for a liberalization of the Zollverein’s tariffs. The Russell government launched a propaganda campaign reminding foreign governments of the glowing benefits of Britain’s market, the blessings of liberalization, and foreign obligations in the face of British magnanimity. The Great Exhibition 1 K. Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 1–5. 2 J. Bowring, ‘Report on the Prussian Commercial Union. Addressed to the Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount Palmerston […]’, 1840, XXI, Reports Commissioners, Parliamentary Papers. 3 Handwritten Report of the Views of Manufacturers [undated], Royal Society of Arts (RSA), John Scott Russell Papers, vol. 1. 4 Ibid.

7.1 Germany and Austria in the mid-nineteenth century

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fitted into this. Four years after the Corn Laws’ abolition, German tariff reduction was still absent. The Zollverein represented Britain’s largest foreign market outside the empire (France being so protectionist as to be nearly impregnable).5 Danish blockades of the Elbe in 1849 focused attention on this. In 1850, Thomas Bazley, President of the influential Manchester Chamber of Commerce, warned the Board of Trade that should there be any renewed disturbance to trade, ‘the most serious consequences may, in the present profitless condition of our staple manufactures, fall upon our operative population …’.6 However, in the same year, Britain’s Consul General to the Zollverein, John Ward, began warning that Prussia might even raise the organization’s tariff to stave off an Austrian bid for commercial leadership. Lord Palmerston threatened British reprisals.7 Altogether, there were great hopes that the Great Exhibition would encourage commercial liberalism in the Zollverein. Significantly, the Royal Commission included staff from the Board of Trade, Thomas Bazley, and even Richard Cobden, a frequent visitor to the Continent. Many also hoped the liberal message of the Exhibition would extend beyond commerce. Albert, for example, appreciated the constitutional gulf between Britain and his country of birth. After 1847, he occupied himself intensively with German affairs.8 But his aspirations, for a united constitutional monarchy with a moderately representative form of government like Britain’s, appeared less likely to be fulfilled by 1849–50. In the wake of the revolutions of 1848, Albert decided to encourage British backing for Prussia, then still resisting Austrian-led Reaction. Unable to give public backing when the Prussian envoy, Radowitz, came seeking his support in December 1850,9 and facing stern opposition to royal interference from Palmerston and The Times,10 Albert used the Exhibition to nurture pro-Prussian sympathies in Britain. He ensured that the Prussian (and not the Austrian) Ambassador, Bunsen, took a leading role in its promotion. The Prince of Prussia, then presumed (wrongly) a liberal, was invited to the opening ceremony and, on the same day as the ceremony, made godparent of the recently born Prince Arthur. Prussia’s christening present – a shield – was prominently displayed in the Crystal Palace.11 It has even been maintained that it was during Wilhelm’s visit to Britain that Albert and

5 B. R. Mitchell, ‘Main Trading Partners’, in idem, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1975). 6 Thomas Bazley to Lord Palmerston, 15 March 1850, Manchester Chamber of Commerce (MCC) M8/2/5. 7 Palmerston to Howard, 18 May 1850, National Archives, FO244/105. 8 K. Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort 1831–1861 (London: John Murray, 1938), Part 3. 9 W. Möring, Josef von Radowitz. Nachgelassene Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart: DVA, 1922), pp. 363–4. 10 The Times, 29 November 1850. 11 T. Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1876), p. 264.

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Victoria arranged the marriage of their eldest daughter, Vicky, to his son, the future German Kaiser.12 Albert aimed to support liberalism in the German states by encouraging familiarity with liberal British life and institutions, and dreamed of a future liberal Anglo-German alliance. Together with Bunsen, he arranged tours for foreign visitors to the most impressive institutions of British political and cultural life.13 Visitors from the German states, and foreigners generally, should be faced with the strength and social stability of liberal Britain, and encouraged to contrast this with their countries of origin. Factors Influencing the German Response to the Great Exhibition German interest in British life was intense. Its standing as the most powerful economic nation, the ‘Eldorado of Technology’,14 meant many studied Britain for economic reasons.15 Britain’s moderate representative government attracted liberal interest, particularly among the new industrial middle classes, the university educated, and liberal civil servants.16 Logically, Britain also became the focus of attention for opponents of modernization. The debate between modernizers and conservatives, growing after 1815, drew on evidence based on the British example.17 Artisans and manufacturers in the German states attributed much of their economic malaise to British competition. Many called for protection. Yet by the 1840s, German industry – particularly in Prussia – had reached the point where commercial liberalization and market access became tempting. British adoption of Free Trade in 1846 ignited a bitter conflagration between protectionists and Free Traders. The former pointed to Britain’s protectionist 12 Jagow, p. 198. 13 See John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), pp. 112–13; Bunsen to Lord John Russell, RSA, John Scott Russell Papers, Royal Commission, vol. 2. 14 M. Schumacher, Auslandsreisen deutscher Unternehmer 1750–1851 (Cologne: Rheinisch-Westphälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1968), p. 170. 15 C. Buchheim, ‘Aspects of 19th Century Anglo-German Trade Rivalry Reconsidered’, Journal of European Economic History, 10 (1998), pp. 273–89; H. Kiesewetter, ‘Competition for Wealth and Power. The Growing Rivalry between Industrial Britain and Industrial Germany 1815–1914’, Journal of European History, 20 (1991), pp. 271–97; C. P. Kindleberger, Economic Response, Comparative Studies in Trade, Finance and Growth (London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 188– 229; W. Treue, ‘Adam Smith in Germany. Zum Problem des politischen Professors zwischen 1776 und 1810’, in W. Conze (ed.), Deutschland und Europa (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1951), pp. 101–33. 16 See, for example, Chapter 2 in J. R. Davis, Britain and the German Zollverein (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); H. Sedatis, Liberalismus und Handwerk in Süddeutschland (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1979). 17 G. von Viehbahn (ed.), Amtlicher Bericht über die Industrieausstellung aller Völker zu London im Jahre 1851 (Berlin: Deckerscher Verlag, 1852), vol. 1.

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past, accused the British of hypocrisy, and saw Free Trade as a trick. The latter argued that protection had stultified the British economy, and that Free Trade represented the best recipe for stability and industrial strength. What was essentially a battle for German identity drew heavily for its ammunition on evidence from Britain. The revolutions of 1848 exacerbated things. Nationalists ascribed Britain’s economic strength to its unitary state structure. It was hinted that Britain opposed German unity in order to maintain economic pre-eminence. Industrial rivalry took on political dimensions, worsened by Anglo-German friction over Schleswig Holstein and Britain’s failure to accord diplomatic recognition to the National Assembly. The Reaction of 1849 brought no respite. Though censorship returned, economic publications remained relatively free of control, and national economists were becoming hysterical. Austro-Prussian rivalry for commercial leadership, meanwhile, resumed and revolved around the issue of more or less protection. In this politically charged commercial discussion, British evidence was crucial. Astute observers like Prince Albert and Bunsen must have anticipated the impact of the Great Exhibition, which invited observation of British life. There was also greater German interest after 1848 in modernization. Pre-revolutionary governments had a guarded attitude towards large-scale industrialization, favouring traditional production. Reactionary governments, paradoxically, decided to accede to economic demands of the revolution, concluding that traditional production had not safeguarded social stability. Liberal economic ministers were maintained in government – notably August von der Heydt in Prussia and Ferdinand von Steinbeis in Württemberg. The artisan sector was cultivated through reform and educational programmes. Licensing of factory production was now relaxed, and the application of new technology encouraged. Exhibitions had been widely supported by German reformers before 1851 as a means of educating producers about technology and markets. States and functionaries had begun to sponsor visits by manufacturers and artisans to exhibitions, request from them reports in return, and disseminate these through relevant publications and channels. Thus had an established personnel and communications network emerged. German governments now embraced such reformist methods, and applied them, on a grand scale, to the Great Exhibition of 1851.18 Organizing the German States’ Presence at the Exhibition Given diplomatic sensitivities in the Reactionary German states, the official invitation to the Exhibition was submitted both to the reconvened Confederation

18 On German exhibitions pre-1851, see U. Beckmann, Gewerbeausstellungen in Westeuropa vor 1851 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991).

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in Frankfurt and via circular to the various capitals in February 1850.19 Tactfully, Germany was invited to provide one single, united display. Yet Austro-Prussian relations were so strained that no all-German response could be reached. In May 1850, the Confederation was forced to allow each government to organize its own contribution.20 The Prussian government had already campaigned for several months for a Zollverein display, probably to forestall and undermine Frankfurt. Prussian modernizers supported the Exhibition’s goals. Its value in terms of increasing German exports was appreciated, and impressed upon the other Zollverein governments in a series of circulars.21 The Exhibition’s propaganda value was also recognized. It might persuade Prussian society of the benefits of modernization, present Prussia as the promoter of progress, and be applauded by liberals across Germany. Prussia also, at this point, sought to extend the Zollverein to commercially liberal Hanover and Oldenburg, and thus both gain access to the North Sea and tip the balance of interests of the customs union towards liberalization, thereby further isolating Austria. Associating itself with the liberal Exhibition might serve to persuade the northern German states of Prussia’s liberal credentials. A Prussian commission was promptly convened at the beginning of April 1850. This comprised influential and liberal Prussian bureaucrats from the Ministry of Trade such as Georg von Viehbahn and Rudolf Delbrück, the Director of the Business Institute Dr Druckenmüller, the Director of the prominent Institute of Business (Gewerbe Institut) in Berlin, Wedding, and members of the Royal Commission of Technology, Dr Schubarth and Dr Brix. It also included several people nominated by the Society for the Promotion of Business (Gewerbeverein), an organization campaigning for government support for industry across the German states. The Commission demonstrably incorporated people of importance in industrial circles inside and outside Prussia.22 Each of Prussia’s provinces was asked to form a subordinate commission, composed of a number of government officials dealing with business affairs and two to ten experts drawn from industry. Anyone wishing to send goods to London was instructed to get in touch with the provincial commissions in the first instance, which would draw up a list of potential Prussian exhibitors and choose which should go. This whole structure had factual as well as state authority – two preconditions of previous German exhibitions. It was also, notably, an olive-branch to a broad cross-section of moderate liberals.

19 Viehbahn, p. 89; Lord Palmerston to Lord Cowley, 15 May 1851, National Archives, FO208/48. 20 Minutes of the Royal Commission, 9 May 1850, Royal Commission of 1851 (RC1851). 21 Included in Viehbahn. 22 Merchant Zimmermann, factory owner Weigert, factory owner Thomas, mechanic Oertling, chemist Dr L dersdorff and factory-owner Bidtel: Viehbahn, p. 89.

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The Prussian commission also campaigned outside Prussia for a united Zollverein display.23 At the Zollverein conference in Kassel in August 1850, the other states acceded to Prussia’s request. Given Austro-Prussian rivalry at this point in political and commercial realms, this agreement represented a significant victory for Berlin. Henceforth, the Prussian commission would be the central body for the collection and transfer of Zollverein exhibits to London. The provincial commissions in Prussia, and the commissions from the other member states, would supply lists of goods chosen. Prussia’s commission would arrange the shipping and insurance of goods recommended to it. At the Zollverein’s next conference, in Wiesbaden in February 1851, further decisions were taken to attain a united display. The Berlin commission would deal with layout; the proportion of space given to each state was calculated; a joint Zollverein catalogue was envisaged; and it was proposed that each state should have agents in London to ensure exhibits were set up properly. There would be a joint, twelve-man Zollverein commission – including Viehbahn and Wedding, as well as other experienced exhibition personnel from other German states. Its members would arrange affairs in London, help produce the catalogue, and serve on juries.24 It was later expanded when the Zollverein was accorded twenty-four juror positions. Its members included the Director of the Berlin Art Gallery, Gustav Friedrich Waagen; the former pupil of Haydn and composer, Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm; the London-based pupil of Liebig, August Wilhelm Hoffmann; Prince Albert’s artistic adviser and confidant, Ludwig Grüner; Professor Schafhäutl of Munich; and the Berlin silk manufacturer Carl Gropius.25 Another decision taken at Wiesbaden was to collaborate with the nonZollverein, northern states. By now, Prussia was secretly negotiating the incorporation of Hanover and Oldenburg into the Zollverein. This was, 23 Ibid., p. 92. 24 The commission was made up of: Viehbahn (head of commission and head juror of class 30); Wedding (juror for class 6 – replaced by Dr Schubarth of Berlin, juror in class 10); Dr von Herrmann of Munich (head juror of class 12 and reporter for class 6); Director Dr Hülse of Dresden (juror for classes 17 and 20, and reporter for class 6); Dr Steinbeis of Stuttgart (juror and reporter for class 22); Geheimrat Prof. Rau of Heidelberg (juror and reporter for class 9); for Electoral Hessen, Mining Inspector Schreiber of Bieber (juror and reporter for class 1); for Grand Ducal Hessen, Rössler of Darmstadt (juror of class 16); for the Thuringian states, Mining Inspector Professor Schueler of Jena (juror and referent for class 24); for Brunswick, Prof. Dr Varrentrapp (juror and reporter for class 2 – replaced by Professor D. Schneider, reporter for locomotives); for Nassau, Ministerial Assessor Odernheimer of Wiesbaden (juror and reporter for class 25); for Frankfurt, Merchant Philipp Ellissen (juror for class 11, and replacement of juror Falk for class 19); for Hamburg, Karl Noback, Direktor of Trades School (juror and reporter for class 14); for Mecklenburg, W. Meyer, Magistrate in Warnemunde (juror for class 26). Ibid., vol. 1, p. 108. 25 Ibid.; U. Haltern, Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen industriellen Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Mönster: Aschendorff, 1971), p. 137.

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therefore, another major victory against Austria, and a step towards a united German display. The inclusion of tried and tested personnel was not the only way in which the home-grown exhibition tradition shaped the response. Pressure from economic modernizers grew for the already well-established German exhibition infrastructure of information dissemination to be applied in London.26 While joint reportage via the Zollverein proved too much for this intergovernmental organization, governments were keen to show willing for economic and political reasons. State funds enabled large numbers of experts and producers to act as official reporters in London. A conservative estimate of the numbers of state reporters would run to two to three hundred.27 Money was set aside for the acquisition of artefacts, designs and drawings, to be brought home and studied, copied or used. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg led the way28 – but even Baden, previously withholding state support for industry, and Austria, with more official ambiguity regarding modernization, followed suit. In many respects, therefore, the German states collaborated over their display. Nevertheless, comprehensiveness and unity were also undermined. Saxony and Württemberg refused, for example, to integrate their goods into a Zollverein display in the sections for machinery and manufactured goods. Political jealousy of Prussian dominance was one reason. So was the conviction that a country was a far better brand than the Zollverein. Though the Prussian organizational model of a commission combining bureaucrats with businessmen was generally emulated, indigenous political cultures in separate states seeped through. In Bavaria and Saxony, for example, one ministerial official directed things. In Württemberg, arrangements were organized by the Director of the Central Bureau for Business and Trade (Zentralstelle für Gewerbe und Handel), created by the state in 1848 in order to give business more government representation. In Baden, the Ministry of the Interior acted as the central commission. The exhibits of Luxembourg – also a Zollverein state – were arranged by its chamber of commerce. In Electoral Hessen, there were two provincial government commissions, in Kassel and Nassau.29 Meanwhile, non-Zollverein German states were also at the Exhibition. Austria produced a predictably state-led response. Andreas Ritter von Baumgartner, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Finance and VicePresident of the Academy of Sciences, was Commission President. The Commission included all the main ministries involved in the economy – Carl 26 See, for example, ‘Der Plan einer Nationalindustrie- und Kunstausstellung von Friedrich List’, in H. R. Schwankl, Das württembergische Ausstellungswesen. Zur Entwicklung der allgemeinen Gewerbe- und Industrieausstellung im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Scripta Mercaturae), pp. 137–41; Verein zum Schutz der vaterländischen Arbeit/Hohenlohe to Bundes-Zentral-Commission, 20 March 1850, E170/482, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg; Vereinsblatt für deutsche Arbeit, 20 February 1850, E170/482, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg. Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 April 1851. 27 Württemberg sent forty-two, which was unlikely to be the largest contingent. 28 Haltern, p. 136. 29 Viehbahn, vol. 1, p. 98.

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Hock (Ministry of Trade), Moriz Ritter von Besteneck (Ministry of Finance), Joseph Kudernatsch (Ministry of Mining and Agriculture) – and sixty-nine commissioners from many German and non-German provinces.30 Accepted exhibits were paid for directly out of state coffers. Though collaborating with the Zollverein over shipping and layout, the northern German states also maintained separate displays. Hanover’s display was directed by the local Gewerbeverein. In Hamburg, the Society of Arts’ counterpart there, the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Künste und nützlichen Gewerbe, enthusiastically undertook the coordination of that city-state’s exhibits, as well as for Bremen and Holstein. Hamburg, after all, was a main beneficiary of Anglo-German trade. It, too, was suspicious of Prussian claims to commercial leadership. Protectionism, which had been stirred up by Austro-Prussian commercial rivalry, also prevented a full showing. The Prussian government confronted this head-on in a public ‘Declaration to the Business Classes’ in June 1850. Stressing that the value of Zollverein exports was around 80 million Thaler, and that most went to markets in Britain or its colonies, it emphasized the Exhibition’s commercial significance. Admitting the inferiority of the Zollverein in mechanical production, the Prussian government insisted that where ‘taste, hard work and aesthetic sensibility’ were required, German goods were equal to anyone’s. Nodding in the direction of economic reformers and modernizers, it argued that ‘no-one, not even he who seems to be on the highest productive rung in business or art, should believe that he has nothing left to learn, that … he cannot still be taught about important aspects of his profession’.31 Nevertheless, as lists of those wishing to exhibit were put together in late 1850, many manufacturers, often prominent ones, held back, either sending in their goods late, once the Exhibition’s success had become obvious, or not at all.32 There was also a clash between German expectations of the Exhibition, and the aesthetic and educational outlook of Britain’s Royal Commission. In the German states, exhibitions were market-orientated institutions, where goods’ prices could be compared. The Prussian government was not alone in selling the Great Exhibition to the public on its commercial potential. The Royal Commission, however, aimed loftily at aesthetic and scientific education. It viewed the Exhibition as an objective, scientific experiment, and steadfastly refused to have price labels attached to goods – leading to a run-in with the Zollverein’s commission. The result was a compromise: labels could be attached to goods saying that they were ‘exhibited for cheapness’ (or some other quality),

30 Mittheilungen über die Industrieausstellung aller Völker zu London im Jahre 1851 (Vienna: K. K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, 1853). 31 ‘Ansprache an den Gewerbestand ber die Beschickung der Londoner IndustrieAusstellung des Jahres 1851’, 27 June 1850, Viehbahn, vol. 1, p. 93. 32 See ibid., vol. 1, p. 110.

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and manufacturers could hand out lists of prices.33 However, the issue festered among German manufacturers, and put many off. To win them over, the German governments produced their own catalogues with price lists. There were also problems over space. For one thing, it had been estimated at first that the German states together would receive 100 thousand square feet of space – equal to the area allotted to France. When it became clear that Austro-Prussian rivalry would prevent a unified display, a row erupted about the Royal Commission’s decision to give the Zollverein 60 thousand, north Germany 10 thousand, and Austria 30 thousand square feet. The Prime Minister of Austria, Schwarzenberg, indignantly claimed that if Austria were now to display on its own, with its non-German territories it would have at least as much, if not more, to show than the rest of the German states put together.34 In fact, the Austrian government had thrown its weight behind the Exhibition, possibly in order not to be outdone by Prussia. The Morning Chronicle in London remarked on ‘the somewhat startling ardour developed by Austria. Northern Germany, which has hitherto been accustomed to regard its southern extremities as incapable of industrial rivalry, seems on the threshold of a new and painful discovery.’35 In reality, there was no chance of this, given Austria’s economic state. Yet Vienna certainly pulled out all the stops in terms of luxury items and goods produced by state-owned industries. To avert Austrian national pride being dented, an additional 10 thousand square feet was granted.36 The Zollverein, meanwhile, found itself with too many goods – particularly textiles for hanging – to fill the space it had been allotted. This was the fault of the Royal Commission, which in effect reduced the space available for exhibits at the end of 1850 by opting for national displays rather than display by class, and for agricultural exhibits and refreshments courts inside the building.37 Not only was the Zollverein’s space reduced, but its display divided, with ninety-three quadrangles downstairs, and twenty-one on the newly introduced galleries. This cut space for hanging, and diminished the display’s sense of unity. The decision to allow it to occupy space unexpectedly left vacant by Russia and America did not alleviate things: if anything, there was an even stronger impression of improvisation,38 made worse by the late arrival of goods.39

33 Appendix B, 14 November 1850, RC1851, Minutes of the Royal Commission. 34 Appendix E, 21 June 1850, RC1851, Minutes of the Royal Commission. 35 Morning Chronicle, 9 January 1851. 36 See 5 May 1850, and Appendix N in 21 June 1850, RC1851, Minutes of the Royal Commission. 37 See Appendix C in 5 March 1851, RC1851, Minutes of the Royal Commission. 38 Viehbahn, vol. 1, p. 110. 39 Appendix XIV, ‘First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, to the Right Hon. Spencer Horatio Walpole, &c &c’, in Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, 4 vols (London: Spicer and Clowes, 1851), vol. 4.

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A final problem encountered in organizing the German states’ response to the Exhibition had to do with politics. By early 1851, Austria had managed to force Berlin to back down from any attempt to lead German unification by military threat, and full-blown reaction had set in. British relations with the Continent deteriorated rapidly. Protests from London about the abolition of constitutions, a public attack on the visiting reactionary Austrian General Haynau, British support for republican Swiss integrity, and the asylum offered to revolutionaries, all meant Britain was identified by the reactionary powers as a destabilizing element in Europe. Together with Russia, Austria and Prussia blatantly concocted a disagreement with the Royal Commission over arrangements for one diplomatic representative to speak for all foreign states at the opening ceremony – resulting in all having to remain silent.40 Frederick William IV of Prussia worked hard to prevent his brother William (the Prince of Prussia) from attending: he and Albert had a heated exchange of letters. Frederick William argued that the Exhibition would bring revolution to London. Albert, somewhat pointedly, argued that, given Britain’s liberal institutions and general economic health, ‘London was the worst terrain in Europe’ for revolutionary plans.41 German intelligence information was forwarded to the Home Office regarding revolutionary activities in London – including a placard, allegedly handed out in Leicester Square (a popular centre of London’s German exile community) calling for the assassination of any German aristocrat visiting the Exhibition: Albert probably correctly divined that this was a falsification originating at the Austrian or Russian embassy in order to pour cold water on the Exhibition.42 Still, there were many in Britain who worried about security and social stability during the Exhibition. For this reason, and to calm tempers abroad, the gesture was made to allow foreign police to work alongside British security forces in London during the event.43 Nevertheless, as the Exhibition began on 1 May 1851, there was deep distrust of Britain in conservative circles in the German states, and fear regarding the possible results of such sudden, unleashed contact with Europe’s most powerful liberal country. British Commentary on the German States at the Exhibition The Great Exhibition generated an enormous amount of publicity, both at the time and later. In general, the vast majority of this literature did not concern itself with one specific country.44 Predictably, that which did focused mainly on France. Less attention was devoted to the German states. 40 Davis, The Great Exhibition, p. 113. 41 Ibid., p. 114. 42 See Franz Bosbach and John R. Davis (eds), Die Weltausstellung von 1851 und ihre Folgen (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002), pp. 342 and 432. 43 ‘First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851’, p. xxxviii. 44 See, for example, the privately published bibliography of contemporary works on the Exhibition: Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Catalogue of Books and Articles upon the

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Some exhibits in the Zollverein section did individually enter the public consciousness. Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers included an Alphabet of Foreign Things,45 beginning with ‘A’ for Kiss’s Amazon, a sculpture dominating the Main Avenue in the Eastern Half and generally viewed as one of the best in the Exhibition. ‘L’ was for the Bavarian Lions by Rauch of Munich, praised as fulfilling the requirements of art and metal casting to a large degree. Loyally, ‘R’ was for Rosenau, Prince Albert’s birthplace – a model of which was also placed in the Zollverein section. Another publication in this series was Ploucquet’s Stuffed Animals,46 based on the famous Stuttgart taxidermist’s display, so popular with younger visitors. These exhibits belonged to the socalled ‘lions’ of the Exhibition, managing to attract widespread attention. Works aiming for universal, encyclopaedic coverage of the Exhibition necessarily took in the German states. Most were of a highly descriptive character, however. Where the work was trying to explain less familiar aspects of the Exhibition to the visitor, or where the educational mission of the Royal Commission played a part, interest in the German states rose: Robert Hunt’s Hand-Book to the Official Catalogue47 aimed to serve as a short, accessible guide round the Crystal Palace, and an adjunct to the Royal Commission’s own catalogue. Here, the Zollverein’s significance was highlighted: Hunt explained that ‘there is, perhaps, no measure connected with our external commerce that has occasioned so much discussion in the present day as the Prusso-Bavarian League, which, under the name of Zollverein, has united for the purposes of trade many of the otherwise independent states of Germany.’ ‘The contributions from these states’, he continued, ‘are of that great importance, that a large and interesting volume might be written on this section of the exhibition alone.’48 Hunt also felt obliged to provide the history of the organization – possibly on account of British ignorance regarding its development. But Hunt’s coverage focused on raw materials and artisan production. While supporting the Royal Commission’s notions of high quality German aesthetic design, however, he did not present the Zollverein as a dynamic industrial competitor. Science and technology in the Zollverein’s display were overlooked, excepting the clocks in the central Octagon Room of the display, which could run for over a year. Such omissions were not found in the Official and Descriptive Catalogue49 of the Exhibition, however, which purported to be an objective account of the building’s contents, yet surreptitiously conveyed to readers the message of the Royal Commission. It focused on industrial strengths like iron and zinc Exhibition of 1851 in the Possession of Charles Wentworth Dilke (London, 1855). 45 Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers: Alphabet of Foreign Things (London: Routledge, 1851). 46 Aunt Mavor’s Picture Books for Little Readers: Ploucquet’s Stuffed Animals (London: Routledge, 1851). 47 R. Hunt, Hunt’s Hand-Book to the Official Catalogues: An Explanatory Guide to the Natural Productions and Manufactures of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations, 1851, 2 vols (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851). 48 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 803 and 805. 49 Official and Descriptive Catalogue, vol. 3.

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production; the application of technology to industry in the form of chemical dyes; machinery of a highly developed sort, notably including telegraphs by Siemens; and the uses of art to manufacturers as demonstrated by the porcelain of Meissen. The aesthetic preoccupations of the Society of Arts produced a long discourse about Prussian and Munich sculptural traditions, praised for trying to recapture the ideal principles of Greek art. The Zollverein came off well in the catalogue, even if there was typical (though understandable) British confusion about German politics: although at the beginning of the volume the states were listed separately, in the body of the text Baden, Electoral Hesse, Lippe, the Saxon Duchies, Brunswick, Anhalt and the Thuringian Principalities were listed under the heading ‘Prussia’. This was a faux pas of some enormity, given German sensitivities regarding Prussian aggrandisement. The German states had, after all, been invited to demonstrate the inferiority of British producers in aesthetic, technological and scientific senses. The Morning Chronicle, often the mouthpiece of the Royal Commission, promised readers at the opening of the Exhibition that the Zollverein’s display ‘is easy to see, will be one of the most attractive portions of the Exhibitions …’. It continued that the exhibits were ‘various, valuable, and superb’, and that ‘enough can be seen of Saxony to predict a severe contest with our woollen and other manufactures.’50 The Official Catalogue’s treatment of Austria was revealing, however: on the one hand, the surprising enthusiasm shown by Vienna for the Exhibition was recognized in the comments that ‘the articles forwarded by them must be acknowledged to have added a large share to the attractions of the foreign side of the building’, and that Austrian metal exhibits ‘bear comparison with the universally celebrated hardwares of England.’ There was enthusiasm for the gothic artefacts sent – an expression of growing British appreciation of this style. However, underlying this praise was the message that what Austria had sent were luxury goods, produced for monarchs. The catalogue pointed out clearly that Austrian linen goods were outmoded, as a consequence of state support. The list of goods produced by state-owned manufacturers conveyed implicitly to British Free Trade readers the evils of the Austrian economy. The liberal press also paid particular attention to the German states’ exhibits in the light of worsening European relations. Some comment took the comparative approach. The Economist contained a long article in June 1851 on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Frederick the Great by Rauch in Berlin, comparing this with the sentiments behind Britain’s Exhibition. ‘In England’, it concluded, ‘private men honour industry, and promote the welfare of all nations; in Germany the sovereigns honour only warriors, and the royal power consecrates only the principle of violence.’51 Some, like Prince Albert, hoped the Exhibition would direct Germans back to liberalism. The Times, in an article on Austro-Prussian Reaction, noted that ‘At this very moment our streets are crowded with strangers who will 50 Morning Chronicle, 5 May 1851. 51 Economist, 21 June 1851.

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carry back with them something more precious than the image of the Great Exhibition – we mean the aspect of a free people attached to its laws.’52 The Economist talked of the Exhibition’s liberal message in the German states: The people of England see clearly, and so do the Germans, that civilisation is everywhere rapidly developing itself without the aid of Prince Ministers, and they will not allow these long to prevent or restrain it. They see the railroad, the steamboat, and the press, – and we have now journals in London in all of the principal languages of Europe – fusing all civilised nations into one; they see national animosities on which the power of many separate governments is founded, disappearing, diminishing the necessity for huge armies, and extravagant expenditure … they see the wire traversing the boundaries of kingdoms, and where-ever erected and extended, laughing to scorn interposing of obstacles of customs-houses and policemen, and they are sensible that that society, of which the telegraph is a part and a convenience, is not made, and is rarely directed and governed by those who have assumed the office of ruling it.53

In one instance, in the Exhibition supplement to the Illustrated London News, the Zollverein display was criticized directly and in a quite extraordinary fashion.54 What motivated this article is unclear: its political undertone is out of character with the paper’s usual reportage, almost leading one to suspect German authorship, possibly by a disgruntled exile. The fact that it was in this publication ensured it had wide readership. Its commentary caused enormous controversy among Germans at the Exhibition who read it, and at home when its content was reproduced there. The article began with a blunt attack on the label Zollverein – stating that this was ‘not the name of any country known either to ancient or modern geography’, and ‘a policy not a country.’ The attempt to incorporate the northern German states into the main body of the Zollverein was, it maintained, ‘an arrangement justified by the geographical relations of the two, but at variance with the political designation and the source of some confusion.’ It stated that ‘disorder in arrangement, singularly enough for the methodical Germans, seems to us to characterise their part of the Exhibition.’ But deeper reasons were also indicated: The arrangement, which deprives the several people of their customary distinctions, to unite the exhibitions of their industries under one political name, does not seem to us to be a happy one. If it could give them a political unity, and make them one state, as they are one people in language and literature, getting rid of the expense of many sovereigns, many courts, and many separate functionaries, we might hail it with satisfaction; but in the Exhibition it only loses them in Prussia, and drowns all their peculiarities in one muddy political stream.

To add insult to injury, the article went on to argue that ‘for such a country and such a people, the exhibition of their industry strikes us as comparatively 52 The Times, 28 July 1851. 53 Economist, 7 June 1851. 54 Illustrated London News, 26 July 1851.

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poor and comparatively uniform.’ Such a situation was symptomatic of both the ‘aggravation’ of governments, and the insistence of Germans on producing all parts of their goods themselves rather than adopting division of labour. This was ‘an approach to barbarism, when every individual provided by his own means for his own wants.’ That German industry was imitative rather than standing on its own feet, and that German design strengths had not been displayed, could be put down to the fact that The Germans supposed they were to sell, as well as exhibit; they looked at the Exhibition as a market, and thought that the cheapness of their hose, their cutlery, their common tools and their cloth would ensure them numerous customers. In fact, many of their articles are avowedly exhibited only on account of their cheapness, not on account of their excellence, their rarity or their beauty; and they have prepared and published a catalogue in which the prices are marked, for the purpose of showing they can undersell the English, particularly in hose, cutlery and cloths. Till the quality of the arts can be brought to a test, this appears to be possible. They imitate our patterns, and try to sell their goods as English...If the Exhibition were a market, where the artisan could buy a pair of pincers, a dandy a cravat, a housewife a jar of preserves or of potted larks, parents Christmas presents for their children, it could scarcely be richer in the supply of these and similar articles from Germany. With some exceptions … the products of German industry, taken as a whole, therefore, may be characterised as displaying little variety; and many parts of it are trivial, neither adding to the national wealth nor helping forward national greatness.

As if all this were not enough, the article finished with the statement that ‘German industry is not only uniform, it is obviously imitative. There is as complete a want of independent thought in their art as in their political reforms.’ One week later, the same paper carried another article devoted to the Zollverein.55 This time, its coverage seemed at first sight more balanced: for example, Berlin porcelains were praised ‘as fine as art can produce’. But the article carried first the rather puzzling comment that princely courts ought to be praised, for ‘a perception of fine forms was not innate. It required cultivation …’. Then came the sting: In general, except as to cast iron, bronzes, chemicals, dyes, and some woollens, German industry seems a step below that of either France or England. It is, however, plain that the Germans have a great aptitude for improvement … In them we have great reason to be interested, and them we must wish to see strong, prosperous and united. They stand between European civilization and Cossack barbarity, and the hope we have that the latter will not be suffered to advance and prevail westward, rests on the Germans, rests on the improving people as contradistinguished from their interfering, and, we are afraid, sometimes retrograde rulers.

55 Illustrated London News, 2 August 1851.

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In order to draw conclusions from the Exhibition, Prince Albert arranged for lectures on the results of the Exhibition to be held at the Society of Arts: here, several speakers noted that important German manufacturers had not turned up at the Exhibition. Nevertheless, it seemed the reformers behind the Exhibition were determined to view things according to their own arguments. Jacob Bell’s lecture on chemistry passed over the ‘unrepresentative’ character of the Zollverein’s showing, and insisted that Britain still needed to emulate Prussia’s technical education. Lyon Playfair, who had been a pupil of Liebig, argued even more strongly for the adoption of German-style, state-supported, science education.56 This argument was repeated on the aesthetic front in the report on art at the Exhibition written by Richard Redgrave as part of the juries’ reports; British industrialists understood little about art or ornament: ‘In France, and some parts of Germany, where taste has long been cultivated, and the value of ornamental design is better understood, these relations are better understood also; and in this country, if good taste is to prevail, the manufacturer must learn to appreciate more highly the value of the designer’s labours, must seek to foster his talents and stimulate his amour propre.’ German state institutions for industrial education were described where ‘no necessary expense is spared to bring to perfection the fabrics wrought in them, both as to the highest excellence of workmanship and materials, and to their embellishment by ornamental design. The best painters, sculptors, and designers, as well as men of the most scientific acquirements in botany, mineralogy, and chemistry, are among their professors; and the works being carried on at the public expense for the attainment of excellence, the cost of repeated failures is unheeded’.57 Though perhaps an exaggeration of reality, all these arguments found direct expression in the Second Report of the Royal Commission, written with a view to deciding what to do with the money raised by the Great Exhibition. The image of the German states promoted by the Great Exhibition spurred the setting-up of the educational establishments at South Kensington and the movement for state education. German Commentary on the Great Exhibition It is difficult to overestimate the quantity of literature the Great Exhibition produced in the German states. There were the publications of modernizers. This included the official Zollverein catalogue,58 state governments’ catalogues,59 reports by individuals, professional societies and chambers of

56 Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Delivered at the Society of Arts (London, 1853), series 1–3. 57 R. Redgrave, Report of Design: Prepared as a Supplement to the Report of the Jury of Class XXX of the Exhibition of 1851 (London: William Clowes, 1852), p. 10. 58 Viehbahn, vol. 1. 59 Mittheilungen.

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commerce, lectures on science and national economy lectures, reports in journals and in pamphlet form,62 the artisans’ and industrialists’ reports,63 and reports on the hundreds of artefacts and drawings transported back home.64 Such material was devoted first and foremost to the transmission of information and the development of the economy. The Zollverein’s catalogue aimed to identify holes in the international market for aspiring German manufacturers.65 Cheaper sources of raw materials viewed in London were suggested. The names and addresses of exhibitors and details of medal winners were given. The catalogues sought to stimulate consumption, raise the standard of produce, and integrate the economy. Unlike their British counterpart, they included full price lists, enabling comparison. They provided detailed descriptions of machinery, often including diagrams, to allow emulation. Some even gave details of where British machinery shown at the Exhibition could be bought in the German states, and carried adverts of manufacturers willing to supply originals or even copies! The modernizing agenda of such literature was explicit. Reports – especially agricultural ones – often carried an analytical commentary on the Exhibition pressing home the advantages of mechanization and the division of labour. 60 See, for example, G. Delabar, Bericht über die Weltindustrieausstellung in London im Jahre 1851 (St Gallen/Bern: Huber, 1852); F. X. Hlubek, Bericht über die englische Landwirtschaft und die zu London 1851 ausgestellten landwirtschaftlichen Geräthe und Maschinen (Gratz: Johann Lorenz Greiner, 1852); Paul Kirchhofer, Bericht über die Abteilung der Baumwollengewebe und Garne an der Allgemeinen Industrieausstellung in London im Jahre 1851 (St Gallen: Scheitlin und Zollikofer, 1852); T. Labahn, Bericht über landwirthschaftliche Maschinen und Ackergeräthe, welche sich in dem IndustrieAusstellungs-Gebäude zu London befanden (Bamberg: Greifswald, 1852); K. H. Rau, Die landwirtschaftlichen Geräthe der Londoner Ausstellung im Jahre 1851 (Berlin: Verlag der Deckerschen Geheimen Ober-Hofbuchdruckerei, 1853). 61 See, for example, C. Sartorius, Die Industrieausstellung in London (Darmstadt: Schaffer, 1851). 62 See for example, F. von Volz, ‘Großbritannien und Deutschland auf der Industrie-Ausstellung zu London im Jahre 1851. I. Großbritanniens Colonial-Schätze’, Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, 7 (1851), pp. 687–728; idem, ‘Großbritannien und Deutschland auf der Industrie-Ausstellung zu London im Jahre 1851. II. Britische Arbeit’, Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, 8/1 (1852), pp. 107–210; idem, ‘Großbritannien und Deutschland auf der Industrie-Ausstellung zu London im Jahre 1851. III. Deutschland zu Großbritannien’, Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, 8/2,3 (1851), pp. 434–73. 63 See, for example, the edited reports in the Stuttgart journal, Gewerbeblatt, between 1851 and 1855. 64 For example, Karl Ritter von Kleyle, Kurze Beschreibung der 1851 vom k.k. Ministerium für Landeskultur und Bergwesen in England angekauften Acker-geräthe sammt den Berichten des Herren Ministerialrathes Karl Ritter von Kleyle (Vienna: Carl Gerold und Sohn, 1852); C. F. Schneitler, Bericht über die Landwirthschaftlichen Maschinen und Geräthe welche von dem Königl. Ministerium für landwirthschaftl. Anglegenheiten in London angekauft sind (Berlin: Verlag von Wiegandt und Grieben, 1852). 65 Viehbahn, vol. 1, p. 237.

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The reports published by the Zollverein’s agricultural juror, Rau, and Austria’s agricultural analyst, Hlubek, did this in detail. They produced calculations showing how much money might be saved on a normal farm, countered notions that British iron machinery was too heavy or complex to suit German agricultural circumstances, and neatly skipped over any worries about farmhands being made redundant, focusing instead on the profit accruing to landowners.66 Modernizers’ reports went beyond the factual and into the same sort of lyrical descriptions of the Exhibition to be found in British publications. Otherwise highly informative reports produced in serial form by F. von Volz in the journal Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft contained the sort of clichéd poetry regarding the Crystal Palace common in Britain. Authors departed from the objective, delivering a grossly flattering image of modern Britain. Von Volz, again, claimed that Britain had enough coal reserves to last five thousand years.67 It is ironic that German reformers showed as much interest in British industrial education as vice versa. Gewerbevereine, in particular, were fascinated by the applied, practical model of industrial education provided in Britain. Observers like Steinbeis, Württemberg’s commissioner, were producing long reports based on the Exhibition to prove the value of practical and voluntary industrial education as it existed in Britain.68 British Mechanics’ Institutes and other voluntary educational establishments were particularly admired. Eulogies of practical British education even blamed the revolutions on the fact that German universities had become too isolated from real affairs, and students too idealistic. Such a nexus of conservatives and reformers possibly enabled the spread of vocational Fortbildungsschulen and Berufssschulen in the latter half of the century.69 The reports of state-supported visitors to the Exhibition, in particular, are a vast untapped resource for the historian. Such reports were often written by people who had not been further from home than the border of their own state, and by that section of society not given to long-distance travel. While the focus of reports was usually on particular areas of professional concern, they reveal starkly the gulf at the mid-century between industrialized Britain and the predominantly agricultural, rural German states. Some betrayed wider preoccupations of the German public. A survey of the reports written in 66 Hlubek; Rau. 67 Von Volz, ‘Grossbritannien und Deutschland. I. Grossbritanniens ColonialSchätze’, pp. 687–9. 68 See in particular Königliche Commission für die gewerbliche Fortbildungsschulen (ed.), Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der gewerblichen Fortbildungsschulen in Württemberg (Stuttgart: Grüninger, 1873), p. 5. See also Frolinde Balser, Die Anfänge der Erwachsenenbildung in Deutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Klett, 1959); Hans Schumann, Baden-Württembergische Portraits (Stuttgart: DVA, 1988); Dr F. von Steinbeis, Fortbildungsschule, Fachschule, Lehrwerkstätte (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1878), pp. 2–3. 69 See, for example, Hlubek, p. 324.

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Württemberg reveals artisans and industrialists reflecting on Britain’s economic superiority and their own inferiority: some ascribed the latter to guild power; some to poor education.70 A few reports contained material more disturbing to their governments. Holch, a clockmaker of Hall, for example, concluded that ‘with regards to all the manufactures … Germany is behind others.’ There was, he maintained, ‘only one means to achieving our objective, and this is: that Germany must become one Empire with or without an Emperor, and that protective duties as well as freedom from guilds should be introduced’.71 Obviously, such adverse comments were not reproduced in the extracts from these reports which were published in journals. National economists also published copiously on the Exhibition in newspapers, printed lectures, and pamphlets. The national economic movement, inspired by Friedrich List, supported industrialization, and belonged to the liberal camp. Yet it was jealous of Britain’s industrial might, and suspicious that Free Trade kept the German economy weak. The national economists’ attitude towards the Exhibition was therefore ambivalent. The Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, a popular and national economist newspaper, praised the liberality of the British government in holding the Exhibition: ‘Forwards is the solution for England and the whole world,’ it declared, ‘and if the promotion of material interests is the way into modernity, then Practical Albion once again leads the world by shining example.’ Yet it also rejected the argument that the Exhibition would bring profit to German industry: ‘Only England will be able to derive an immediate advantage from the Exhibition, and one only needs to walk through the streets of London to see how speculators are trying to extract every possible profit from it.’72 There was widespread liberal interest in the Exhibition in the German states, however. Much literature was in truth an expression of frustration regarding the failure of 1848. Nowhere was this clearer than in the satirical writings of Lothar Bucher, exiled ‘‘48-er’ living in London. These appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in serialized form throughout the Exhibition, and later were published as a book.73 In an entertaining, and yet politically calculated fashion, Bucher sent up the exaggeration of modernizers regarding the Exhibition – pointing to the unpleasant queues to the Crystal Palace, the mats at the door produced by inmates in Pentonville Prison, and denying that the building was anything special. His real purpose, however, was to comment on German politics. ‘The commissioners of the absolutist states of Italy, even of the Pope,’ he maintained, 70 John R. Davis, Württemberg at the London Exhibitions. A Study in the Dissemination of Knowledge (Kingston University: European Research Centre, March 1995), discussion paper 95/2. 71 Holch in Hall, E170/484, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg. See also Davis, Württemberg at the London Exhibitions. 72 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 April 1851. 73 Lothar Bucher, Kulturhistorische Skizzen aus der Industrieausstellung aller Völker (Frankfurt am Main: C. B. Lizius, 1851).

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… have enough national pride, or at least shame, not to reveal to the peoples of the world the disunity of their fatherland … There is no Germany in Hyde Park. Germany is once again a criminal expression, the ‘honourable colours of the German Empire’ are only good for sticking in your pipe, and the workers sent over to help set things up were chosen from the loyal. It would be more difficult to form a living and characteristic picture of our industry from the fragmentary and shrunken parts there than it would be for Italy. Not only do we have to give up a part of ourselves to that mish-mash of peoples called Austria: the contributions from the rest of Germany … are impossible to decipher for me or any other mortal.74

There was a good deal of travel literature written for the Exhibition: innocuous guidebooks to London and the Exhibition, written to aid those going to London and describe what was there to those who could not go. These precursors to the Baedeker guides (begun in 1862),75 provided an insight into German visitors’ activities in London; their journey route; their experiences with British immigration controls; and where they found accommodation. Many eulogized Britain, describing the enormous portions of food served in restaurants, the wonders of railway travel and so forth. Naïve comparisons were often undertaken of German and British national characteristics. By and large, the British were seen as lacking the style of the French, but as being much less superficial and more honourable.76 At the same time, however, several popular travelogues were published conveying a more political agenda. Ghillany’s Tour nach Paris und London, for example, uses a trip to the Exhibition as the occasion for reflections upon wasted opportunities. His first stop on the way to Britain was Frankfurt. Visiting the Paulskirche, the vacated home of the revolutionary National Assembly, he noted that One goes away with a feeling of depression and bitterness; one does not know whether to direct one’s anger more at the idiocy of the democrats, or against the cunning of the middle party, or against the dynastic jealousies of the states; three parties which seem each to carry equal guilt for the failure of this righteous grasp for the greatness and unity of our nation. With what different feelings would I have now gone among Englishmen and Frenchmen, if Germany had turned from its multicoloured fragmentation into a firmly united country with a national parliament, a powerful army, a young, developing fleet! How do I come now? Not as a member of a large and powerful nation, but of a piece of ‘Zollverein’.77

74 Ibid., p. 174. 75 Malcolm Warner, The Image of London. Views of Travellers and Emigres 1550–1920 (London: Trefoil Publications in Association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1987), p. 146. 76 For an example of this type of literature, see K. F. H. Strass, Ein Streifzug nach London. Reise Taschenbuch fur die Besucher der Weltstadt zur Industrieausstellung (Berlin: Allgemeine Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1862). 77 F. W. Ghillany, Eine Tour nach London und Paris (Nuremberg: Bauer und Raspe, 1853), p. 32.

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A great deal of nationalist and liberal discussion was generated by the abovementioned Illustrated London News article. Ghillany pointed out indignantly that the paper was mistaken in thinking that the German showing in London was representative of its industry, given protectionism, political disunity, and the tendency to view the Exhibition in commercial, rather than aesthetic terms. With regard to the accusation of imitation, he fired back that … in this respect the Germans will be able to compete easily with the English. We have not yet reached the stage in Germany where we judge the creative talent and the value of a people according to its industrial produce. The English may by all means be ahead of the Germans in terms of mechanization; but with regards to the true creative artistic spirit, it might be said there is no other European people ahead of the Germans – and certainly not the English! If one contrasts its achievements in the fields of sculpture, painting and music with those of other nations, one asks oneself who stands in first place?78

But the accusation that German exhibits lacked a national character was echoed in artisan reports, national economist public lectures, newspaper articles, and even official reports. This possibly compelled Prussia to include in the official Zollverein catalogue a long explanation for the jumbled nature of exhibition. Certainly, the Great Exhibition appears to have encouraged the desire for a single national unit at future exhibitions. It also seems to have convinced many that German economic strength vis-à-vis Britain must be demonstrated on future occasions. Possibly the most direct, and certainly one of the most entertaining, candid and far-reaching travelogues, however, was Fanny Lewald’s England und Schottland.79 Though rather opaque ideologically, Lewald’s opinions were wholly left-of-centre. Much of her work criticizes the overt capitalism found in Britain – the grinding poverty, prostitution, and dirt of London. She also has no time for the laudatory tone of other travel books, and pointedly derives much comic humour from the anti-climax of reaching Britain. However, Lewald’s main message related to German politics. At great length, she describes the course of the German revolution and its failure. Her commentary on Britain, and the advantages its successful Glorious Revolution conferred on it, turns into a long analysis of the political situation in the German states reminiscent of the thoughts of many of her contemporaries – including Karl Marx. In a final tour de force, Lewald’s book becomes a travel book covering the revolutionary sites of London! Reactionary forces could not leave such political commentary unchecked. The Wiener Zeitung, a staunchly pro-reaction newspaper, launched a counteroffensive. A series of articles reviewing the travel literature on the Exhibition included a character assassination of Lewald – dismissing her as a hypocrite, a subversive and a woman. Austrian readers were pointed instead towards 78 Ibid., pp. 35–40. 79 Fanny Lewald, England und Schottland. Reisetagebuch (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn, 1851).

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more conservative works, particularly one by the elderly cathedral deacon Jaumann,80 an author who made the journey to Britain contrary to doctor’s advice, and whose account was therefore restricted to people met in trains, food eaten, and little else.81 Other anti-modernizers published on the Exhibition. Many guidebooks commented negatively on Britain’s modern system. Long passages decried the pace of life and the diminution of its quality. Social conditions in Britain were criticized roundly. Anti-modernism cut across political boundaries. Both the Wiener Zeitung and Lewald could agree that there were losers in the midst of Britain’s industrial success. Artisans resented the way the Exhibition appeared to promote the abolition of the guilds and the division of labour,82 and artisan reporters staunchly defended the quality of their product in contrast, as they viewed it, to the aesthetically deplorable British industrial output.83 The sentimental attachment to the homely artisan in contrast to the perceived chicanery of modernizers even generated its own comic literature.84 Like Britain, the Great Exhibition fed into an ongoing German aesthetics debate. Many worried about industrialization’s impact on art, and the dispute was perhaps that much bitterer due to the economic importance of artisans.85 August von Reichensperger, publishing in feuilleton editions of the Wiener Zeitung, was one of the most vocal opponents of the Exhibition’s aesthetic message.86 He focused not just on the Crystal Palace and its contents, but on London buildings generally. He argued that, because of the division of labour, most British no longer understood aesthetic principles. The best way to restore good ornamentation and design would be to return to the work environment of the fourteenth century – in other words, pre-Reformation – and to reinstate the connections between religion and production. Hence, Reichensperger admired the Medieval Court at the Exhibition, but was damning about most else. With an additional religious flavour, he thus represents a German counterpart to John Ruskin. Perhaps the most important German treatment of the Exhibition’s aesthetic message, however, came from Gottfried Semper, an aesthetic modernizer. Another political exile after 1848, Semper supported the Exhibition’s liberal agenda. He was involved in the Exhibition’s organization, drawn into the 80 Domdekan von Jaumann, Reise nach London und Paris im Jahre 1850 (Heilbronn and Leipzig: Johann Ulrich Landherr, 1851). 81 See Wiener Zeitung, 15 October 1851. 82 See also, for example, Robert Wunderlich, Der Beobachter und Berichterstatter in London, seiner Umgebung und seinem Kristallpalaste […] (Winterthür, J.J. Heer, 1851). 83 See, for example, the reports in E170/484, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg. 84 See, for example, Anon., Meister Tolpatsch auf der Londoner Welt-IndustrieAusstellung im Sommer 1851 (Leipzig: C.W.B. Naumburg, 1852); J. W. Christern, Pudelnärrische Reise nach London im Jahre 1851 (Leipzig: Ignaz Jackowitz, 1851). 85 Georg Maag, Kunst und Industrie im Zeitalter der ersten Weltausstellung. Synchronische Analyse einer Epochenschwelle (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986). 86 Wiener Zeitung, 15 October 1851.

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debates surrounding the internal painting of the building, and worked on the ‘trophies’ in the Main Avenue (aesthetic displays of industrial goods). The international Exhibition gave Semper a unique opportunity to contrast different styles and to adopt an anthropological approach to aesthetics. His conclusion was that the materials used by different cultures dictated the choice of ornamental style. This propelled him into further study of the history of ornamentation in relation to the material development of cultures, a line of study influential in the realms of history of art. It also led him to conclude that it was pointless attempting to revive past aesthetic principles in an industrial age, or recovering idealized notions of art. While Semper viewed ornament as depending on physical laws, the materials used in ornamentation dictated different methods of execution. An industrial age, with its machinery and new materials, he concluded, needed a new aesthetic system, not an old one. Semper’s theories were transferred to others through his publications, and via his teaching work. He worked first at Cole’s School of Practical Art between 1852 and 1855. Here, however, his more progressive notions clashed with Cole’s – not least because Cole still held that new industrial aesthetics could only come through catechetical teaching of ancient principles, whereas Semper felt experimentation and workshop exercises were more suited to developing an industrial art. Subsequently, Semper moved to the more conducive position of Professor of Architecture at the new Polytechnical College in Zürich. His upbeat approach to the question of ornamentation in an industrial age opened the way for movements such as art nouveau and Bauhaus.87 Conclusion In Britain, the German states were supposed to play a particular role according to the plans of the Great Exhibition’s organizers. In comparison with France, they did not receive a great deal of attention once the Exhibition had opened, however. Liberal treatment of the German display tended to evaluate it negatively, especially given reactionary circumstances abroad. Generally, the fragmented display and the hazy British grasp of German affairs tended to obfuscate and reduce awareness. The coverage sharing the Royal Commission’s purposes did capitalize on the German display, however. The Exhibition fuelled 87 On Semper, see Haltern, p. 384, and E. Gilmore Holt, The Art of All Nations 1850–73. The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 57. See also Martin Fröhlich, Gottfried Semper. Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der E.T.H. Zürich (Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1974); H. F. Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper. Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996). See also G. Semper, Die Vier Elemente der Baukunst (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1851); idem, Akademische Vorträge. I. Über die formelle Gesetzmässigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol (Zürich: Zeller, 1856); idem, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst und andere Schriften über Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Kunstunterricht (Mainz and Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1966).

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for years to come the calls of reformers for state-administered technological and aesthetic educational establishments along the lines of those found in Prussia and other German states. The hint of foreign commercial threat, meanwhile, inserted themes into public discourse that would later develop into AngloGerman rivalry at a more popular level. The ‘Made in Germany’ psychosis of the 1890s was rooted in the arguments of Benthamite reformers regarding the German exhibits in 1851.88 The Exhibition had a deep impact in the German states. In economic terms, it supported modernization at a crucial moment when the German peoples were poised between a premodern and a modern economy. Mass-production was advertised. The benefits of new technology were promoted. The international market was opened up. Producers and buyers formed contacts across borders. The Exhibition promoted modernization in terms of technology transfer. Knowledge was disseminated of new means of production in Britain, other foreign countries, and even other German states. Though detailed work has yet to be done on this complex subject,89 it has been accepted that exhibitions provided an important channel of communication, even if the results only became apparent in the long term.90 Historical research suggests the Great Exhibition’s importance to, for example, the textile industry, mining, and agriculture in the latter half of the nineteenth century.91 The iron-and-glass building at the Munich Exhibition of 1854 demonstrated that technical development in Britain was being absorbed by a German public greedy for modernization.92 Good educational establishments, technological expertise, and a positive attitude towards new technology (together known as Social Overhead Capital)

88 For literature and a discussion of this theme, see Kiesewetter , pp. 271–99. 89 This point is made by Willi Schmidt, ‘Die frühen Weltausstellungen und ihre Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der Technik’, Technikgeschichte, 34 (1967), pp. 164–78. On technology transfer, see Hans-Joachim Braun, ‘Technische Neuerungen um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Das Beispiel der Wasserturbinen’, Technikgeschichte, 34 (1967), pp. 285–305; David Jeremy, International Technology Transfer: Europe, Japan and the USA 1700–1914 (Aldershot: Elgar, 1991); idem (ed.), Transfer and Business Enterprise (Aldershot: Elgar, 1994). 90 Hugh G. J. Aitken, The State and Economic Growth (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1959); Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism 1850–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 91 E. Kroker, Die Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert. Industrieller Leistungsnachweis, Konkurrenzverhalten und Kommunikationsfunktion unter Berücksichtigung der Montanindustrie des Ruhrgebietes zwischen 1851 und 1880 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1975); Hugo Riede, Die Entwicklung der württembergischen, Textilindustrie (Bietigheim: Gläser und Kömmerle, 1975). 92 Helmut Hilz, Eisenbrückenbau und Unternehmertätigkeit in Südddeutschland. Heinrich Gerber (1832–1912) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), p. 28.

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93

are required for a transfer to take place successfully. Here, too, the Great Exhibition contributed directly. Artefacts and drawings helped form collections and museums for the purpose of technological education. The practical, apprentice-based form of industrial training was admired, and contributed to the promotion of practice-based training in Germany.94 The Great Exhibition raised the standing of modernizers at home in the German states, by allowing them to rub shoulders with foreign counterparts. It served as an important occasion in the bonding process between economic reformers and state governments. A sort of rapprochement resulted, and much of the literature on the Exhibition constitutes a kind of blood-letting after the revolutions of 1848. This did not mean the simple adoption of factorybased production. Württemberg, for example, decided that the best niche in the international market remained that of artisan produce, but used the Exhibition to reform this sector.95 Yet each state in its own way utilized the Great Exhibition to modernize the economy. Did the Exhibition contribute to the ‘take-off’ in the 1850s? Some German state officials involved in the Exhibition afterwards maintained that it did,96 probably to defend their positions and that of industrialization, both of which were still contested. The question is not easily answered. Many other factors were probably far more important. However, the evidence of single companies seems to suggest that the market opportunities provided by the Exhibition were important. Krupp, for example, owed his success to his debut at the Great Exhibition.97 Siemens and Reuters also benefited greatly from 93 These points are made forcibly in Peter B. Heller, Technology Transfer and Human Values: Concepts, Applications, Cases (New York and London: University Press of America, 1985); Nathan Rosenberg and Claudio Frischtak, International Technology Transfer: Concepts, Measures, and Comparisons (New York: Praeger, 1985); W. W. Rostow (ed.), The Economics of Take-off into Sustained Growth: Proceedings of a Conference held by the International Economic Association (London: Macmillan, 1963). 94 See Balser, pp. 56–9; Haltern, pp. 319–20; Franz Haverkamp, Staatliche Gewerbeförderung in Grossherzogtum Baden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung des gewerblichen Bildungswesens im 19. Hahrhundert (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1979); F. W. Henning, Handelsakademie – Handelshochschule – Wirtschaftsund Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät, (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1990). 95 W. A. Boelcke, Handbuch Baden Württembergs. Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur von der Urgeschichte bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), ch. 9; idem, Sozialgeschichte Baden-Württembergs 1800–1989 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1989), pp. 19–70; Reiner Rinker and Wilfried Setzler, Die Geschichte Baden-Württembergs (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 1986). 96 See, for example, Paul Hirschfeld, Württembergs Großindustrie und Großhandel (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1889); L. Vischer, Die industrielle Entwicklung im Königreich Württemberg und das Wirken seiner Centralstelle für Gewerbe und Handel in ihren ersten 20 Jahren (Stuttgart: Carl Grüninger, 1875). 97 Wilhelm Berdrow (ed.), The Letters of Alfred Krupp 1826–1887 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930), p. 115; W. O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power 1834–1914 (London: Temple Smith, 1975), p. 107.

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the publicity generated by the Exhibition.98 Common sense suggests that such market access would be invaluable when the German states were beginning to export. Perhaps, however, it is less important whether or not the Exhibition brought profit to German manufacturers: the fact was, it appeared to have done so. This strengthened the modernizers’ position in the German states. The Great Exhibition promoted the cause of commercial liberalization in the German states. It did not, as some have claimed,99 convert Germans to British-style unilateral Free Trade. However, it provided more ammunition for the supporters of commercial liberalization. It supported Prussia’s position during the commercial conflict with Austria, accorded Berlin the status of commercial leader of Germany abroad, and helped smooth the entrance of Hanover into the Zollverein. The Great Exhibition contributed to stability within the German states by allowing economic liberals to collaborate with the state. In the long term, however, the Exhibition encouraged instability. The modernizing tendency of the Exhibition – the expansion of markets, liberalization of traffic, dissemination of knowledge, international movement of personnel – worked against the existence of small German governments. One implicit message of the Exhibition was also that only nation-states formed a solid basis for international economic success. Reactionary governments embraced the Exhibition as a life-line in 1851. In reality, however, they contributed to their own demise.

98 Haltern, p. 303. 99 K. Luckhurst, The Story of Exhibitions (London: Studio, 1951), p. 115.

Chapter 8

Modern to Ancient: Greece at the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace Debbie Challis

It [the Great Exhibition] cannot fail to soften, if not to eradicate altogether the prejudices and animosities which have so long retarded the happiness of nations; and to promote those feelings of ‘peace and goodwill’ which are among the surest antecedents of their prosperity ….1

The 1851 Great Exhibition was one of the first international occasions in which Greece participated as an independent nation-state. Greece had gained its independence in 1833, having been a colony of the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries, and displayed a small collection in the Great Exhibition at London less than two decades later. The Exhibition promoted friendly internationalism, and it was within this atmosphere of peaceful goodwill that the display from Greece was positioned next to (and almost within) that of its traditional enemy and colonizer, Turkey.2 Greece’s small display was located on the north-east side, immediately next to Turkey and Egypt, with Persia on one side and Spain and Portugal on the other. The layout of any exhibition reveals a great deal about implicit ideological assumptions, and the floor plan of the Great Exhibition is no exception. The position of the Greek display in the Exhibition building marginalized Greek claims to be a European state, and reflects an attitude, largely dominant in western Europe at that time, that modern Greece was part of the Levant or ‘Oriental’ world rather than Europe. The established European powers and leaders of industrial technology, Britain and France, as well as the larger Levantine states of Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey also easily overshadowed Greece’s small display. Peter Hoffenberg has pointed out that ‘Nations and races, resemblances and differences were invented, co-ordinated and legitimised’ in the Exhibition’s vision of a ‘modern functionalist society’.3 This chapter considers the Greek contribution to the 1 The Great Exhibition 1851. The Art-journal illustrated catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: George Virtue, 1851), p. xi. 2 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 187–9. 3 Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 204.

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Great Exhibition, and examines how assumptions about the modern Greeks and Greece were confirmed by the nature of the Greek exhibits. The Greek display was subject to condescension from British and other commentators in 1851 due to the perception of modern Greece as an Oriental rather than a European nation. It is difficult to get a sense of the nature of the Greek display at the Great Exhibition from the contemporary catalogues. This is partly because of the smallness of the display, but also because the use of ‘Greek’ invariably described a modern, neoclassical statue or a vase in the ‘Greek’ style rather than any product from the Greek display. Exhibits in the classical style of ancient Greece were widely admired; however, such neoclassical objects were not produced by Greece, but by the large industrial nations such as Britain and the US. This chapter contends that the prevailing image of Greece as a nation in the Great Exhibition was actually displayed in the American Court as Hiram Powers’s sculpture The Greek Slave. The Greek Slave portrayed the Greek nation figuratively as an oppressed female victim in a sculpture that was in the neoclassical style. The sculpture was used as a vehicle for the critique of slavery as well as inciting some discussion about the artistic portrayal of the naked female body. Powers’s The Greek Slave negatively reads the Orient as slave-trading and brutal, though the irony of a slave-trading nation displaying an icon of the oppression of slavery in its Court was not lost on cultural commentators in 1851.4 The aesthetic and political debates raised by The Greek Slave were a prelude to the controversy raised by the use of colouring on sculpture in the Greek Court at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was one of the main legacies of the Great Exhibition, and the Greek Court there continued the Exhibition’s teleology of technical progress through the display of objects and reconstructions from ancient Greece. No reference was made to modern Greece in the Greek Court at Crystal Palace, though there was a Byzantine Court. Instead, an emphasis was placed on the scientific observations and new discoveries made by British archaeologists in the interpretation and reconstruction of ancient Greece. The Greek Court at the Crystal Palace could afford to be more innovative in its display and reconstruction of ancient Greece and Greek art than the British Museum because it did not have the same dilettante tradition of displaying classical art that was used in the Museum. The Crystal Palace could place the display of material culture from classical civilization within a broader aesthetic debate that had scholarly significance as well as popular appeal. Ultimately, the modern state of Greece would capitalize on its ancient past and use the display of ancient Greek art to position itself as a European nation in the Colombian World’s Fair at Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. However, at the Great Exhibition and its successor, the 4 A ‘companion’ piece to The Greek Slave, ‘The Virginian Slave’, was published in Punch in 1851 during the Great Exhibition. Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 67.

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Crystal Palace, the vision of Greece was based on an idealized version of its ancient classical past; a past which could also act as an opportunity to engage with broader aesthetic and political debates in the mid-nineteenth century. The Greek Court in 1851: Between Europe and the Orient Greece became formally independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1833 after a bitter and long war of independence. The Great Powers of Russia, France and Britain were its guarantors; the reason for the partnership of these powers was mainly so that one imperial nation did not gain dominance in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. It is in many ways surprising that Greece had a display at the Great Exhibition at all, and the fact that it did was ‘indicative of the efforts to organize the country according to European standards and to open up the Greek economy to the international markers’.5 Eleni Bastea has identified three main ‘yearnings’ in nineteenth-century Greece: the first was to be accepted within the family of modern European nations, the second was to secure internal political stability, and the third was to promote a strong connection with the classical past.6 These yearnings, particularly the first two, motivated the Greeks to participate in the Great Exhibition since it meant that they could exhibit at a major international event with a view to promoting Greece – culturally and economically – within Europe. The Greek revolution and nationalistic struggle against the Ottoman Empire was influenced in part by the growth of romantic and ethnic theories of nationalism throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. The War of Independence and formation of the Greek nation was fuelled by a desire by Greek intellectuals and revolutionaries to lay claim to their ‘European inheritance’, to which they believed the modern Greeks were heirs, through the ancient Greeks and the Byzantines. An image of national unity could be promoted at the Great Exhibition, and the projection of this national image abroad could also help present Greece as a modern European state. The participation of Greece in the Great Exhibition was informed by both ideological and economic motivations. The Greek display was small and comprised natural produce and folk crafts. Artemis Yagou has traced the reaction to the Great Exhibition within Greece, and sums up the position: ‘The production base remained archaic and the development rate was negligible. The country was still in a pre-industrial, pre-banking and even a pre-property state’.7 British intellectuals and politicians in the nineteenth century were divided about modern Greece and Greeks. On the one hand, a feeling of romantic philhellenism prevailed, informed by ideals of ancient Greece and the poetry of Lord Byron; on the other hand there was a more prosaic and pragmatic attitude, 5 Artemis Yagou, ‘Facing the West: Greece and the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Design Issues, 19 (Autumn 2003), pp. 82–90. This article is comprehensive on the Greek reaction to the Great Exhibition. 6 Eleni Bastea, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1. 7 Yagou, p. 82.

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which dismissed modern Greek pretensions to be the heirs of the ancients. In In Byron’s Shadow, David Roessel charts the depiction of modern Greece in the English and American literary imagination throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argues that not only were the Greeks considered by philhellenes as the inheritors of classical Greece in the early nineteenth century, but also the Ottoman Turks were considered as Oriental trespassers and usurpers in lands to which they had no cultural or ethnic connection.8 The Greek display at the Great Exhibition exploited these notions of romantic nationalism that had led philhellenes in Europe to support the Greeks in their war against Ottoman control. The items on display in 1851 were natural minerals and products, folk art or agricultural produce which positioned Greece as an ‘unspoilt’ rural nation. After independence, ‘the clear dichotomy of ancient/West and modern/East began to break down’ in the 1830s, and Greece was located in an imaginary ‘grey area’ between the European West on the one hand and the Levantine East on the other.9 At the Exhibition, Greece was sandwiched between the displays of Egypt and Turkey, with those of Spain and Portugal to the other side. The Austrian theorist Jacob von Fallmerayer had published his conclusions on the ethnology of the modern Greeks in a History of the Peloponnese in 1830, in which he contended that there was no racial continuity between the ancient and modern inhabitants of Greece.10 This controversial view undermined Greek claims to be the true descendants of the classical Greeks. It would be misleading to claim that Fallmerayer’s views directly affected the Exhibition organizers, but it is fair to comment that these views were embedded, albeit in a more moderate form, within intellectual and cultural attitudes to modern Greece in the mid-nineteenth century. The position of the Greek display between that of Egypt and Turkey and next to that of Spain and Portugal effectively positioned Greece for visitors to the Exhibition as within the Orient but on the edge of Europe. In addition, the Don Pacifico affair of 1850 illustrated the more pragmatic view of modern Greece in diplomatic and political circles, since the feeling among many politicians and diplomats was that an independent Greece could be more of an irritant in international affairs than an idealistic triumph of Hellenism. David Pacifico was a Gibraltar-born Jew who could claim British protection and did so after his house and business were destroyed by an antiSemitic riot in 1847. When Pacifico’s claims to costs were not addressed, the British blockaded Piraeus and other Greek ports. This aggressive action was led and defended by Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, who argued that full force was needed to protect British citizens across the globe. Jeffrey Auerbach points out that this action was condemned across Europe, and 8 David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in English and American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9 Ibid., p. 113. 10 Robert Shannon Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 35, and Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 2.

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stresses its importance in undermining the feelings of internationalism that informed the Great Exhibition a year later.11 It also makes the presence of a Greek display at the Great Exhibition even more surprising and renders more apparent the importance of the Exhibition as a place for the Greeks to project an international image of their new nation-state. The Greek display was formed from natural products, such as minerals and sponges; foodstuffs, for example honey and oil; and folk crafts, like fine embroidery and woodcarvings. The responsibility for the displays from Greece lay with a committee of Greek politicians and businessmen as well as Londonbased Greeks. The products were well received, gathering many ‘Honourable Mentions’ in the Reports by Juries; for example, the Bishop of Euboea gets an ‘Honourable Mention’ for his Rhodomeli honey as it is ‘rather more aromatic and pungent than that of Hynettus’.12 The Reverend Agathangelos also received a gold medal for his ecclesiastical woodcarvings and the Illustrated London News noted the excellence of a carved cross by Reverend Triandaphylos. The Illustrated London News commented that the government of Greece had ‘done a good deal to promote this style of illustration, in a school of arts established in the Cathedral in Athens.’13 In this way, the Greeks were depicted as carrying out the aims of the Great Exhibition – promoting the arts and establishing schools to do so. Greece also contributed one juror to the 317 instructed to judge the exhibits: Emmanuel Psycha, Civil Engineer and Professor of Physical Sciences, was a judge in ‘Class XXVII Manufacturers in Mineral Substances. Use for Building or decoration, as in Marble, Slate, Porphyries, Cements, Artificial Stones & c’. However, despite the efforts of the Greek state, the majority of the commentary on the modest Greek display was at best patronizing, if not entirely negative. Derogatory comparisons were made between the artworks of the ancient Greeks and the agricultural products and folk crafts displayed by the modern Greeks, which were noted in the newspapers and journals in Greece at the time.14 M. Blanqui, a French economist who wrote extensively on the Great Exhibition, sent a report to the French Institute. Blanqui’s report was quoted in the catalogue The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, and it contrasts the Levantine East with the Chinese East: Persia and Turkey, Egypt, Greece, the barbarous states, and that mid-region which might be called the little East have nothing in common with the Great East … There is to be found in these countries the same weakness for tinsel, the same richness of material and poorness of workmanship, but the taste and the art are completely different and even in their greatest flights they bear the imprint of the West.15 11 Auerbach, p. 164. 12 Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was divided, Volume One: Introductory, Awards, Reports – Classes I–IV (London: William Clowes, 1852), p. 161. 13 The Crystal Palace and Its Contents. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London, 1852), p. 119. 14 Yagou, p. 87. 15 The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, p. 210.

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Blanqui compares the ‘little East’ of Persia, Turkey, Egypt and Greece to the ‘Great East’ of India and China, and contends that the countries of the ‘little East’ are influenced by the Western world, i.e. Europe. In this demeaning attitude towards the countries of the ‘little’ and the ‘Great’ East, Blanqui firmly places Greece within the Levantine East alongside Turkey and Egypt. The Greek display was placed physically and critically within the Orient, not Europe. Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire, was lauded for taking part (the Turkish government received a medal for making a special effort for the Exhibition), and the Illustrated London News noted its essential part in the ‘Grand Tour’ as well as its importance politically and diplomatically to Britain.16 The Ottoman ‘achievements’ may have been stressed for trade interests, as Britain was the Ottoman’s largest trading-partner in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as to stop the Empire falling apart, which was thought necessary to stop a scramble for Ottoman territory and war between the European powers.17 Greece got no such recognition, culturally or politically. While Greece was displaying itself through its own national court, a different vision of Greece was being projected in the various neoclassical sculptures and ‘Greek’ designs by European and American artists that were displayed in the Great Exhibition. For example, the British artist John Gibson’s neoclassical The Greek Huntsman was displayed in the Fine Arts Court, and the Illustrated London News’ catalogue, The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, commented on the sculpture that the ‘ancient Greeks created gods and historic heroes – we content ourselves with mere imitations of gross humanity’.18 Much of the sculpture submitted in Class XXX, ‘Sculpture, Models and Plastic Art’, was neoclassical, and artists were drawing on an ideal of classical Greece that had been prominent for centuries. It is significant that Charles Cockerell, a neoclassical architect and antiquarian; John Gibson, a neoclassical sculptor; and Charles Newton, a classical archaeologist at the British Museum, were among the jurors for that category. Ancient Greek art and industrial technology were combined in an eight-metre copy of the Parthenon frieze on wallpaper, which used a ‘trompe l’oeil’ effect to give the illusion that it was three-dimensional. However, the most enduring neoclassical sculpture was a sentimental vision of modern Greece in Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, which was displayed on a special canopy at the centre of the American Court. The sculpture was first exhibited at the Graves Gallery in London in 1845, and Powers produced many replicas, one of which was created specifically for the Great Exhibition. Powers supplied a text to place The Greek Slave within a narrative that explained the statue’s nudity, femininity, rosary and chains of slavery:

16 Ibid., p. 366. 17 Muge Gocek, Rise of the Bourgeoise, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 88. 18 The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, p. 76.

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The Greek Court at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham

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The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek revolution; the history of which is familiar to all […] and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God.

The text and sculpture combined projected a romantic picture of modern Greece as feminine, helpless, Christian, European, and abused by the Orient. The sculpture’s neoclassicism – it is almost exactly a copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos – laid claim to its cultural antecedents in ancient Greece, while the rosary/cross places the subject in a firmly modern Christian era. Powers’s accompanying text positions the sculpture in an even more explicit narrative framework. The Greek Slave embodied a moral ideal as well as a nation, and was taken up by slavery abolitionists in and outside of America (Powers was himself an abolitionist): John R. Davis has commented that ‘the statue immediately appealed to liberals and Christians’.19 The Greek Slave raised strong political issues, of which slavery was only one. The morality of The Greek Slave was also reflected in its ideal sculptural form and the removal of ‘messy bodily processes’ such as pubic hair, colour and wrinkles, which disavowed ‘all the messy interiority of the human form, as interior and metaphorical’.20 The white marble rid the sculpture of physical sensuality and fed an image of The Greek Slave that was racially pure as well as ethically correct. Related concerns over the use of colour on sculpture later fed into reactions to the display of John Gibson’s Tinted Venus at a later world’s fair (discussed below). The depiction of this female nude also raised issues of race within the artistic representation of slavery, since slavery in the modern Western world had been, on the whole, ethnically made up of black Africans and their descendents in the West Indies and southern states of America. Only two years after the Exhibition, the sculptor John Bell exhibited a sculpture of a seminaked black female, A Daughter of Eva, at the Royal Academy in 1853. Bell followed this work with The American Slave at the International Exhibition in 1862. Neither attracted the same amount of attention as The Greek Slave, though Bell went on to design the ‘Americas’ group for the Albert Memorial in 1864. Charmaine Nelson has argued that in the aesthetics and ethics of nineteenth-century visual culture, black women were ‘positioned outside “normal” sexuality’ and were seen to need no protection or device to medicate their sexualization in art.21 The Greek Slave had such a protective device in the form of Powers’s accompanying statement about the sculpture to position the nudity within a narrative context. Arguably the portrayal of a white European

19 John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). 20 Michael Hatt, ‘Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude’, in Alison Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude (London: Tate Publishing Ltd, 2001), pp. 37–49. 21 Charmaine Nelson, ‘Venus Africaine: Race, Beauty and Africaness’, in Jan Marsh (ed.), Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 (Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2005), pp. 46–56.

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woman as a slave attracted more attention to the continuation of the slave trade in America than a sculpture such as Bell’s The American Slave. The Greek Slave also depicts a brutish Turkish Orient. This Orient is imagined by the accompanying narrative text and depicted visually in the chains holding the girl in passivity. The viewer of this work is uncomfortably placed as a buyer, or at the least as a voyeuristic observer, at an inferred eastern slave market. Ultimately, this depiction would have some impact on the perception of the Ottoman Empire, where, as in the US, slavery was still permitted and was not banned until 1857, in the aftermath of the Crimean War. If modern Greece was depicted as victim, the unseen aggressors or slave-owners were meant to be the Turks or to be read as an allegory of American slavery. Most cultural commentators seized upon the American allegory, for example Punch published a parody, ‘The Virginian Slave’, which showed a black plantation slave in the same posture as The Greek Slave. The US received more condemnation for its slave trade in Britain as it was considered a ‘Christian’ country, whereas the Ottomans were Islamic and not perceived as being subject to the same religious principles that condemned slavery. From the end of the eighteenth century to the time of the Great Exhibition, European commentators on the Ottomans had stressed the despotism of the Turks, and regularly used the oppression of the ‘ancient inhabitants’ of the Ottoman dominions and their use of slaves (particularly women) to validate their views.22 The anti-slavery movement and the titillating images of an eastern seraglio within art and literature meant that there was widespread interest in the practice of slavery within the Ottoman Empire. The Greek Slave perpetuated the stereotype of a brutish, slaveowning Oriental. Although commentators of the Great Exhibition did not universally admire Powers’s sculpture, its constant reproduction in miniatures and photographs illustrated its visual power and romantic appeal in both Britain and America. This vision of Greece was visually more in tune with the philhellenic image of modern Greece in Britain and America than the products presented in the Greek display at the Great Exhibition. Ancient Greece at Sydenham: Teleologies of Technology One of the main permanent successors to the Great Exhibition was the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which presented the arts and ideals of ancient Greece within its Fine Arts Courts. The Crystal Palace was a commercial enterprise run by the Crystal Palace Company, which reused and enlarged Paxton’s famous building, relocated to an area of south-east London outside the centre of the city. It capitalized on the fact that the Great Exhibition made the display of material culture a social ritual for a greater number of people, and continued to exert a didactic control and stimulation of social behaviour

22 Aslı Cırakman, From the ‘Terror of the World’ to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (New York: P. Lang, 2002), p. 150.

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that Tony Bennett observed with regard to the Great Exhibition.23 However, it had less of a pedagogic aim, and more of a focus on entertainment. The social ritual of exhibition-going, as analyzed by Carol Duncan, took place in a very different space to a traditional museum establishment, such as the National Gallery. This social ritual was important to the success of the Crystal Palace, which, despite having something of a ‘theme park’ atmosphere, was in its opening decades up to date on developments in archaeology and art criticism in the interpretative display of its Fine Arts Courts. As well as the Fine Arts Courts, the Crystal Palace displayed industrial hardware and their products in courts, such as Textile Fabrics, and modern sculpture in the French and Italian Sculpture Court and the German and English Sculpture Court. The collections were rounded off with a Portrait Gallery along a corridor leading to a court on the Natural History of the Old World and the Natural History of the New World. The Crystal Palace was built and designed as an encyclopaedic display of ancient and modern civilization for a general audience. Popularly known as the ‘Palace of the People’, it was an educative tool and was used to showcase the triumph of modern technology, as well as the impact that technology had in generating new knowledge about the ancient world. The reconstructed Crystal Palace was enlarged to include ten Fine Arts Courts (the Great Exhibition had just the ‘Medieval Court’), and these were meticulous ‘reconstructions’ by ‘architectural grand tourists and grand archaeologists’; in other words, by well-known travellers who used their foreign travels as vehicles to explore art, architecture and archaeology.24 The historical epochs making up these Fine Arts Courts were Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantine, the Saracenic Alhambra, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Europe, Italy and the Pompeian House. The layout of the main courts reflected the mid-nineteenthcentury concept of the Great Chain of Art: Egypt led to Greece, and Greece to Rome (and so on). Assyria was left out of this chain, and, as Nicky Levell argues, the arrangement was a ‘eurocentric classification’, which promoted the idea of Europe going from one period of civilization to another over time.25 These Fine Art Courts were influenced by the new knowledge and interest in the past generated by archaeology. Archaeology was in turn presented as a new science and another example of the technical progress of the modern Western world. The Greek Court illustrated the advanced architectural engineering and innovations of ancient Greek art through new finds made by the science of archaeology. In this way, the ancient and modern teleology of progress was combined through the use of the ‘Great Chain of Art’ as an exhibitionary narrative on the one hand, and the interpretation made by the new science of archaeology on the other. Classicism within exhibitions and reconstructions 23 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 24 J. R. Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854-1936 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2004), p. 67. 25 Nicky Levell, Oriental Visions: Travel and Collecting in the Victorian Age (London, 2000), p. 30.

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of ancient Greek material culture were usually made in order to claim the mantle of Western heritage. This claim to Greco-Roman identity also became important in projecting progressive forms of political ideology and democracy towards the end of the nineteenth century.26 The Fine Arts Courts were intellectually accessible and offered visitors visually appealing reproductions of the past. They capitalized on popular images of antiquity. The Assyrian Court displayed reconstructions of the recently discovered Assyrian antiquities, which were very popular in the pages of the Illustrated London News, while the setting of the Pompeian Court would have been familiar to readers of Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii.27 Shelley Hales has shown how the Pompeian Court was ‘championed by the Illustrated London News’ for recreating a Pompeian house, and how this domestic setting appealed to the Victorian ideal of the family.28 At the same time as capitalizing on popular interest in and constructions of the past, the Fine Arts Courts contributed to scholarly debate on antiquity. The Crystal Palace did not have the tradition of ‘gentlemanly connoisseurship’ that the British Museum had, and could therefore be more freely innovative in its displays and reproductions. The use of new technological advances within archaeology meant that it could promote the positivistic historical teleology of civilization’s advancement through scientific progress. This narrative of progress was played out not just in the display of contemporary objects, but also through the interpretation of antiquity in its Fine Arts Courts. The modern techniques of display meant that Fine Arts Courts could engage with controversial scholarly topics. The use of colour on sculpture in the Greek Court provided the catalyst for a practical and theoretical discussion about colour on sculpture and its racialized meanings. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’s popularity, at least up until the early 1880s, meant that the Fine Arts Courts were high profile centres which attracted a large audience with a wide social makeup. The Courts offered a site of visual consumption of the ancient world, and the Greek Court was offered as an encyclopaedic vision of the ancient Greeks. The Greek Court made readings of the ancient world based on the scientific analysis of archaeology and engineering – in this way, scientific observation was converted into mass entertainment.29 There were varying ways of reading the Fine Arts Courts: they could be read visually by the non-literate, or a visual reading could be aided by an informative guidebook. This guidebook explained the culture of 26 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 128. 27 Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28 Shelley Hales, ‘Re-casting Antiquity: Classics and the Crystal Palace’, paper presented at The Crystal Palace at Sydenham conference, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 26 March 2004. I am grateful to Shelley Hales for making a copy of her paper available to me. 29 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 104.

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the Court to the uninformed reader, and also provided more details and debate for the educated reader. Important figures involved in the burgeoning science of archaeology wrote these guides. The official guidebooks to the courts were published separately at a reasonable price, or combined in one expensive edition. Austen Henry Layard, the traveller–archaeologist who excavated in Assyria, wrote the handbook for the Nineveh Court. George Scharf, the artist for Charles Fellows (who excavated in Lycia), is responsible for writing the guide to the Roman Court, and had curatorial responsibility for the display of the Roman and Pompeian Courts. The Greek Court was under the control of Owen Jones, an influential designer and architect. Jones had been Superintendent of the Works for the Great Exhibition and was responsible for the decoration of Paxton’s building, using gaudy colours that attracted much attention and criticism – the colourful interior can be seen in paintings by John Nash. The importance of the Greek Court can be measured by the fact that Jones himself wrote its guide. Such was the interest in and importance of archaeology and new finds that there was a proposal to display an archaeological excavation of a tomb in Egypt; although this idea was subsequently abandoned.30 Instead, the Courts enacted the findings of archaeology on the architecture and arts of the civilizations represented at the Crystal Palace, and tailored these enactments for different registers of education and knowledge. Jones’s official handbook describes the Greek Court’s arrangement in detail. The architectural order in the principal court was Doric, with proportions copied from the Temple of Jupiter at Nemea, and the square porticoes were copied from the Greek agora. The inscription over the middle entrance read (in Greek), ‘Among the Greeks the contest was not about riches but about excellence’; over the right-hand entrance, ‘To pursue the beautiful together with simplicity’; and over the left, ‘To pursue science without enervation’. The inscriptions repeat phrases from Pericles’ funeral oration, quoted in Thucydides, and their use illustrates the Victorian idealization of Athenians as uncorrupted scientific innovators with an innate sense of beauty. A model of the Parthenon, which was a quarter the size of the real building, was a main attraction; its construction was directed by F. C. Penrose. Penrose had discovered that the ‘perfect symmetry’ of the Doric columns on the Parthenon was an optical illusion, and that using entasis (or curvature) made the columns appear wider in the centre.31 Penrose’s An Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture was published by the Society of Dilettanti in 1852, and has remained an eminent text on Athenian architecture – it contains extremely detailed measurements and observations on the engineering of the building. Penrose said that entasis was not noticed in the modern age until the 1830s, and that it was Penrose himself who was responsible for the replica Parthenon 30 Piggott, p. 48. 31 F. C. Penrose, An Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture: or the results of a recent survey, conducted chiefly with reference to the optical Refinements exhibited in the construction of the Ancient Buildings of Athens (London: Society of Dilettanti, 1852).

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meant that the displays at the Greek Court were informed by the most up-todate discoveries in classical archaeology. The other casts on display represented the ‘progress of Greek sculpture’ and used figures from collections in the Louvre, the Capitoline museums, Dresden, the Vatican and Athens.32 Jones and Digby Wyatt travelled around Europe in 1852, collecting casts of sculpture and architecture from museums. This collection, to an extent, answered the call of the archaeologist and curator Charles Newton, in his Oxford lectures, for a cast gallery to aid the student of classical archaeology ‘to develop, by a series of transition specimens, the chief features of successive styles.’33 Jones evidently felt that the cast gallery was important, since his guidebook devoted over sixty pages to descriptions of the casts. Though there were casts on display in London and elsewhere, the casts were the first attempt in England to systematically collect examples of sculpture on display in museums across Europe and display the casts in successive styles. The Art Journal considered that the casts were ‘arranged successfully in periods’, since the casts were displayed in chronological order from Archaic Greece to the later Greco-Roman period, which, again, showed that contemporary models of critical analysis were being applied to the exhibitionary display of the Greek Court.34 A cast of the recently discovered ‘Ionic Monument’, which was taken from Lycia in Turkey to the British Museum by Charles Fellows, was displayed as a restored and complete monument. This copy reflected a new emphasis on keeping monuments intact and not merely displaying the sculpted pieces of monuments. It also followed the campaigning of Charles Fellows, since the British Museum had exhibited the Lycian antiquities as separate pieces of sculpture in a ‘picturesque’ fashion. Fellows had openly challenged the British Museum’s exhibition practice over the display of the Lycian antiquities in the late 1840s and argued for their display as part of a complete monument. In this way, the Greek Court, unlike the British Museum, followed the findings of the archaeologist responsible for the discovery and removal of the Lycian antiquities. Among all these copies of classical sculpture, the casts of the Parthenon sculptures took centre stage. Jones argues that ‘among the countless statues and bas-reliefs in the museums of Europe’, the Parthenon sculptures … are pre-eminently national monuments and historical documents and are therefore of inestimable value in fixing the standard by which all specimens of ancient art which have been preserved may be measured and classified.35

32 Owen Jones, The Greek Court erected in the Crystal Palace (London: The Crystal Palace Library, Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. v. 33 Charles Newton, ‘On the Study of Archaeology’, in idem, Essays on Art and Archaeology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880), pp. 1–38. 34 ‘School of Sculpture at Sydenham: The Greek Court’, Art Journal, 6 (1 November 1854), pp. 317–20. 35 Jones, The Greek Court erected in the Crystal Palace, p. 93.

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Jones’s argument follows the comparative approach of Charles Newton given in lectures in Oxford in 1850, which he probably had access to through their mutual friend and colleague, George Scharf. The casts in the Greek Court were not coloured. Even black-and-white pictures reveal that, in contrast to the bright tones of the Egyptian Court, the casts must have looked anaemic. However, the centrepiece of the Court, the Panathenaic frieze, was in colour – depicting the horses in browns and greys, and the skin of the riders as warm olive with gilded hair and red lips. J. R. Piggott outlines the huge row in the press over this depiction: The Times felt Jones ‘trespassed on classic propriety’, while Blackwood’s Magazine ran a virulent campaign against Jones.36 The Athenaeum argued that colour distracted from the art of sculpture. No doubt the colouring of the Parthenon horsemen touched a nerve, since they had been appropriated by architects on various public buildings throughout the early nineteenth century, particularly on the Hyde Park Gate, as emblems of national pride, representing affinity between England and Ancient Athens. In response to the criticism, Jones published ‘An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court’, which collected visual and literary evidence in defence of polychromy on classical sculpture and architecture. This ‘Apology’ was published within the Guide to the Fine Art Courts; its inclusion illustrated how important the debate was. In his ‘Apology’, Owen Jones admitted that much of the use of colour was experimental, but he was engaging with a more general and fiercely argued debate over polychromy on sculpture in the mid-nineteenth century. The colours used on the Greek Court and the model of the Parthenon are listed, and evidence is given for each use. Jones quoted evidence from an 1836 committee appointed by the British Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects to consider the employment of colour on the Parthenon sculptures. Although the committee published ‘largely negative’ results, as Ian Jenkins notes, in 1839 ‘the walls of the Elgin Room were painted a deep red’. This possibly reflected the results of the committee.37 This debate had come back into prominence in the 1850s after the publication of Jacob Ignaz Hittorff’s Restitution du Temple d’Empedocle à Selinote (1851) and F. C. Penrose’s Principles of Athenian Architecture (1852). Penrose stated that the architrave band of the Parthenon was a strong red, blue and gold, and that there was a blue background behind the sculptures as well as some evidence for traces of paint on the sculptures themselves.38 The Royal Institute of British Architecture held three meetings devoted to the discussion in 1852.39 Andreas Blühm argues that neoclassicism considered polychromatic practice an attack on the ‘beau 36 Piggott, p. 93. 37 Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Artists in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992), p. 48. 38 Penrose , p. 55. 39 I. D. Jenkins and A. P. Middleton, ‘Paint on the Parthenon Sculptures’, The Annual of the British School of Athens, 83 (1988), pp. 183–207, 185. Results of recent tests on the buildings of the Acropolis, the Elgin collection and the sculptures in Athens

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ideal’ of sculpture, and new archaeological discoveries challenged this ‘colour blind’ notion. For example, traces of colour were, and remain, clearly visible on the sculptures from the Temple of Aegina in the Glyptothek in Munich.40 In Jones’s ‘Apology’, expert witnesses defended the colouring of the casts; F. C. Penrose gave evidence on architectural colour, particularly with regard to the ceiling, mouldings and ornamentation, while G. H. Lewes presented a collection of historical evidence from antiquity and more recent research. The Crystal Palace embraced controversial, innovative and challenging discoveries made by archaeologists about the classical world. The Greek Court displayed the results of new finds in archaeology while more excavations were taking place that confirmed the evidence of colour on Greek sculpture. Mary Watts describes the astonishment of her husband, G. F. Watts, at the vivid colour on the sculptures of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which he was helping Charles Newton excavate in 1857: In excavating they would now and then find an absolutely perfect specimen of colour, but so evanescent that in a few minutes of sunlight, it would utterly disappear … A great block happened to be turned over while Mr Newton was absent and the workman called Signor to see it. On it was a border of leaf and flower ornament in strong fine colour – red, yellow, and blues.41

Richard Westmacott Jr later considered Newton to have confused ‘mere stains’ for traces of colour on the sculptures from the Mausoleum. In 1865, Newton asked Watts to confirm in writing that he had seen colour and not ‘accidental stains’. Watts confirmed the vivid tones of the colour in a letter dated 6 January 1865, writing that ‘Mr Westmacott cannot understand that colour, which has been preserved for 2,000 years, should have entirely disappeared in the few months in the transmission of the sculptures from Asia Minor to England’.42 Westmacott continued to condemn notions of polychromy in Greek art, and he defended the traditional ‘beau ideal’ approach to classical art.43 Part of the problem with the concept of polychromatic Greek sculpture was due to stereotyping about the aestheticism of different civilizations and races. Coloured statuary and monuments were associated with non-Western cultures such as Hindu art, of which Westmacott wrote that ‘its debased quality deprives it of all interest as a phase of fine art’.44 Michael Hatt has argued that are in Ian Jenkins, Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 2001). 40 Andreas Blühm, ‘In Living Colour: A Short History of Colour in Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century’, in idem (ed.), The Colour of Sculpture 1840–1910 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1996), pp. 11–60. 41 M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: Annals of an Artist’s Life, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co, 1912) vol. 1, p. 165. 42 G. F. Watts, MSS. Watts Gallery, Compton, vol. 4, G.12. 43 Richard Westmacott, The Schools of Sculpture, Ancient and Modern (Edinburgh, 1864), p. 138. 44 Ibid., p. 50.

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sculpture and the abstract language of sculpture played a part in the culture of colonialism, and that ideas about sculpture and race were intertwined. Lesser civilizations and races were believed to prefer bright and gaudy colours on sculpture, while the Greeks and their European heirs appreciated ‘the abstract quality of uncoloured sculpture’. Colouring on sculpture, particularly classical sculpture, was shocking to many because it resembled the coloured statutory of non-Western cultures.45 Evidence that the Greeks painted their sculptures and the reconstruction of that polychromatic practice by modern artists arguably broke down the boundaries between ‘classical’ and ‘primitive’ art, which were seen as being ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ respectively, and implied a similar erosion of cultural differences between the two. However, although the colouring of sculpture remained controversial, by the end of the nineteenth century there was a more general acceptance of the use of colour in classical antiquity. This must have been influenced in some part by the replica Panathenaic frieze in the Greek Court. The visualization of Greece reconstructed in the Greek Court, and the ancient past in general throughout the Fine Arts Courts, illustrates an early interest in reconstructing antiquity which would become important in the theatrical productions of Greek plays and the Olympian vision of artists such as Frederic Leighton later in the century. Lawrence Alma-Tadema was influenced by the colouring of the frieze in his Phidias and the Parthenon Frieze (painted in 1867, but not displayed until 1884), which quotes directly from the Greek section of Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament in its ornamental colour on the entablature and rafters of the Parthenon.46 Jones published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856, and this book contains Jones’s examples of historical styles of design and ornament, which were influenced by his work on the Crystal Palace. Alma-Tadema’s representation of the frieze in the painting also influences the colouring of the frieze of the Greek Court at Sydenham – Alma-Tadema represents the horsemen, which was the same part of the frieze presented in colour in the Greek Court. The Crystal Palace later displayed one of the most controversial uses of colour on sculpture – John Gibson’s Tinted Venus. Gibson created a ‘typical’ classical sculpture except for the fact that it was delicately coloured with blue eyes, auburn hair and gold earrings. Tinted Venus was displayed in Rome in 1856, the same year as the Greek Court opened at the Crystal Palace, It was shown in London in the International Exhibition of 1862, and became notorious. The Cornhill Magazine wondered if colour added any use or inspiration to the sculpture: ‘Has Mr Gibson’s Venus much more life in it? Does it look more as if it could move and do? I am not a sculptor myself and I don’t think so.’47 The real problem with Tinted Venus was, as Michael Hatt points out, that colour increased the sensuality of the naked female body (unlike The Greek Slave, discussed earlier).48 45 46 47 48

Hatt, pp. 39–40. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856), plate xxii. ‘At the Great Exhibition’, Cornhill Magazine, 5 (June 1862), pp. 665–81. Hatt, p. 39.

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In many ways, though, despite its colour, the Tinted Venus fuelled critical conceptions around the aesthetically and racially pure female body, which had certain ‘Greek’ facial characteristics and was ‘perfect’ in its anatomical depiction. Tinted Venus was placed on a special model of a Greek Temple created by Owen Jones at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1862, a further illustration that the Crystal Palace welcomed innovations in art.49 Tinted Venus was not the first polychromatic sculpture to be displayed at an exposition. Charles Simart had recreated a polychromatic copy of Athena Parthenos, the huge chryselephantine statue of Athena that stood in the Parthenon in antiquity, and displayed it to ‘an astonished public’ at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. What is so fascinating about the Greek Court at Sydenham, the Athena Parthenos and the Tinted Venus is that all these experiments with colour were at popular international exhibitions situated on the periphery of traditional art museums. The Greek Court (and the other Fine Arts Courts) could engage with new discoveries in art and archaeology, and display these innovations with less internal friction than at the British Museum. Experimentation was more possible at commercial exhibitions that celebrated the technological advancement of the nineteenth century and the progress of civilization. The new finds and ideas in contemporary archaeology displayed in the Greek Court at the Crystal Palace led to a greater critical awareness of such issues among the exhibition-going mass public.50 By illustrating the frieze in colour with references to the optical illusion of symmetry in the Parthenon and the attempt at putting together a cast gallery, the Greek Court incorporated new evidence into the display of Greek art and architecture. The debates on polychromatic practice were played out in the popular public exhibition space of the Crystal Palace and not just in the pages of academic journals. The Fine Arts Courts in the Crystal Palace would not be the last time that such reconstructions were created; perhaps the most enduring replica of the Parthenon was built for the Tennessee Centennial Exhibition of 1897 and still stands in Nashville.51 Ultimately, in both the Great Exhibition and its successor, 49 Blühm, ‘In Living Colour’, p. 58. 50 Ulrich Finke, ‘The Art Treasures Exhibition’, in John H. G. Archer (ed.), Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester: Ten Illustrations of Patronage and Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 102–26. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition engaged with the issues of space and presentation of art raging around the National Gallery in the 1850s. The change from the display of art based on notions of taste to a more systematic chronology reflected new methods of critical analysis and innovative methods of interpreting art in a public arena aimed at a more diverse audience. 51 Wilbur F. Greighton and Leland P. Johnson, The Parthenon in Nashville: Athens of the South (Nashville, TN: J.M. Press, 2000). The Tennessee Exhibition combined a funfair, a street in Cairo, a Chinese village, and a ‘real’ post-slavery plantation, but the centrepiece was the Parthenon. In 1897, the Parthenon in Nashville was dramatically lit up by electric light at the opening ceremony – displaying technology and progress while lying claim to the glories of the classical past. Classicism also symbolized the American ‘republican spirit’, thereby lending the nation and democracy the ‘perfect historical

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the Crystal Palace, the classical image of ancient Greece as combining artistic perfection and technical innovation prevailed. However, the experience of being involved in the Great Exhibition had an impact in Greece and on the way in which Greece represented itself at future world’s fairs. After a catalogue was made of the collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens in the late nineteenth century, the Greek government built up a collection of casts of the antiquities displayed in museums in Greece. One hundred and twelve pieces were chosen to make up the Greek nation’s contribution to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, the same year that Greece was declared bankrupt. Charles Waldstein, who at this point was Director of the American School in Athens, became the official delegate of the Greek government to Chicago. Waldstein negotiated the sale of the 112 casts to the Art Institute of Chicago for 20 thousand gold francs, creating needed revenue for the Greek government. Although the Art Institute of Chicago still has casts of the Parthenon frieze within the interior and the exterior of its building, the casts were probably destroyed after 1945. Subsequently, Greece learned to profit from the image of Ancient Greece and, in doing so, forged links between its status as a modern nation and its ancient past.

pedigree’ by drawing comparisons with the ‘original democratic and republican peoples’, the Greco-Romans. See Greenhalgh, p. 128.

Chapter 9

Degrees of Otherness: The Ottoman Empire and China at the Great Exhibition of 1851 Francesca Vanke

Nations from the Eastern world were represented among the many contributors to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Apart from the displays from India, however, which commanded a very high profile in contemporary commentary, other Oriental countries in evidence at the Exhibition, most notably China and the Ottoman Empire, are less well documented. They were represented by fewer artefacts and attracted comparatively little attention in the catalogues. Despite the relative scarcity of the literature, an examination of the commentary which is available, as well as analysis of the exhibits themselves, may be used to throw considerable light on contemporary British attitudes towards the East. They may also serve to investigate the notion of ‘otherness’ as it relates to these two nations from the Eastern world with whom Britain had markedly differing relations at the time. Edward Said, in his 1978 work Orientalism1 and in subsequent publications, opened up an internationally influential, ongoing debate concerning the nature of the ‘other’ in relation to Western nations during the imperial period, arguing that the ideologically fabricated, self-referential European system he terms Orientalism consigned the Islamic world to a unique position of otherness in relation to the West. In this chapter, the types of objects displayed at the Great Exhibition, the ways in which these were represented, and the varying opinions expressed towards China and the Ottoman Empire will be explored, with the purpose of drawing out both the similarities and, more importantly, the differences in the ways the two nations were perceived. It will aim to complicate and develop the concept of otherness posited by Said, suggesting that there was not one monolithic, unchangeable other, but that both these politically significant nations occupied positions on what could be termed a sliding scale of otherness. Britain’s attitudes would have been far from indifferent towards either China or the Ottoman Empire at the time, since in the twenty years preceding 1851 she had been significantly involved with both, directly and indirectly. In order to understand the context within which these countries were represented at the Exhibition, it is necessary first to outline briefly the state of contemporary 1

Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

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British relations with them, to ascertain whether the current political events would have been likely to prejudice their representation and if so, how this would have occurred. As far as the Ottoman Empire was concerned, in 1851 two types of ideas, politically speaking, would have been uppermost in the minds of British commentators. The first and most important of these would have involved the relations between Turkey and the other countries which formed her empire; the second would have concerned current Ottoman domestic policies. In the first instance, the main point at issue was that fundamental principle underlying so many aspects of the Eastern Question throughout the nineteenth century: the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. During the 1820s, Britain had cooperated with Russia in order to induce the Ottomans to grant independence to Greece, and a combined Russian, British and French squadron had destroyed a Turkish–Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. As a result of this, Turkey declared war on Russia in 1828. By 1829, Russia had won decisively enough to have captured Istanbul itself, but refrained because this would have caused such upheaval that it could have precipitated war with the other European powers who would have objected to excessive Russian dominance over the Ottoman Empire. Russia therefore decided that it would prove more advantageous in the long term to maintain the status quo. Nonetheless, Britain and other European countries still suspected Russia of intending to gain too much control in the Balkan region. Britain was particularly uneasy at any signs of Russian expansion, since her borders with Afghanistan also bordered on British India. Britain came to view Russia as the principal threat to British interests during this time and held it as expedient to operate a pro-Ottoman policy, a view summed up by the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston in concise terms as Her Majesty’s government attaches great importance to the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman empire, considering that state to be a material element in the general balance of power in Europe.2

This view was strengthened further when Russia appeared to be allying herself with the Ottoman Empire during the Egyptian crisis of the 1830s. The powerful governor of Egypt Muhammad ‘Ali3 had defeated the Ottoman army in 1832 and invaded Syria. The Ottomans appealed for help and Russia offered it, which alarmed the other European nations, who again suspected Russia of attempting to gain too much influence. In 1839, the Ottomans were defeated by the Egyptians, and the empire was in danger of collapse. At this point, Britain joined with other European states in mediating with Muhammad ‘Ali

2 Lord Palmerston, Letter, Public Record Office, FO 78/226, 4 February 1833. 3 Muhammad ‘Ali (c. 1770–1849) a powerful military commander in Egypt, deposed the existing Pasha and took control of the country in 1807. For an account of his rule and eventual defeat, see M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East 1792–1923 (Harlow and New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 70–72 and 145–54.

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4

and the new Ottoman Sultan, ‘Abd-ul Mejid, with the specific intention of preventing Russia from forming a special relationship with Turkey. By 1841, Muhammad ‘Ali had been expelled from Syria and an international convention had restored the balance of power. As far as Ottoman domestic policy was concerned, both ‘Abd-ul Mejid and his predecessor Mahmud5 had been undertaking a wide-ranging series of reforms, the so-called Tanzimat (‘orders’ or ‘regulations’), which aimed to modernize the army, the education system, national infrastructure, and administration.6 This was undertaken not in order to Westernize for the sake of any innate belief in the superiority of a Western system, but because the Ottomans recognized that, in order to maintain their position, it was imperative to be able to compete militarily with the West when necessary. There is considerable debate about how successful these reforms proved to be in actuality, but there was great approval of the intentions behind them expressed in contemporary British commentaries, both those written specifically concerning the Great Exhibition and those published elsewhere.7 By 1850, although there had been no actual war over issues concerning the empire for the past decade, there had been smaller disputes8 between Russia and the Ottomans in 1848, over which Britain had again supported Turkey. It was generally acknowledged that the political situation was volatile, and publications on Turkish and Balkan current affairs written around the time of the Great Exhibition contain considerable speculation about the prospect of a renewed war with Russia which, in the event, broke out in the Crimea in 1854 and lasted until 1856, after which a European coalition was formed to keep Russia in check. However, it is clear that, concerning both internal politics and external relations, the overall attitude of the British was strongly pro-Ottoman at the beginning of the 1850s, at the time of the Exhibition. British foreign policy regarding China was entirely different, although events in the twenty years prior to the Great Exhibition had scarcely been more peaceful. The British had traded with China since the sixteenth century. Most of the country was closed to foreigners, although foreign merchants (mainly British, French and Portuguese) were permitted to conduct a limited amount of trade on strictly proscribed terms. Sino-British relations, however, had been problematic during the early part of the nineteenth century, partly due to British objections to the Chinese restrictions on their trading and also due to their dislike of being considered inferiors at the Chinese court, and being obliged to observe what they considered the outdated and humiliating 4 Abd-ul Mejid reigned from 1839 to 1861. 5 Mahmud II, known as the Reformer (reigned 1808–39). 6 For details of the Tanzimat, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 74–128, and Yapp, pp. 108–14. 7 For example, A Fullarton, A History of the Ottoman Empire from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London, 1854). 8 See M. S Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 113–14.

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protocols demanded by the emperor. Further problems were caused by the activities of the East India Company, which had held a monopoly on opium imports for many years.9 The opium was grown in India, and proved far too lucrative a source of income easily to forego, earning fortunes amounting to millions of pounds sterling for the Company by the late 1830s.10 Opium addiction became a serious social and economic problem in China, fostering corruption, sapping health and morale, and making considerable inroads into the national silver reserves, which were continually leaving the country illicitly in exchange for the drug. In 1839, a high-ranking official, Lin, put in charge of stamping out this nationwide addiction, had even taken the step of writing directly to Queen Victoria, asking her to put a stop to the British importation of opium into China, but it is unlikely that this letter was ever received.11 Following defeat in the Opium War of 1840–41, the Chinese were forced to realize their military weakness12 and at the treaty of 1842 had ceded certain rights to the British, including the island of Hong Kong and the right to trade at five ports on the mainland. By the late 1840s, the most contentious issue was the continued Chinese refusal to allow the British to enter the city of Canton, or to trade anywhere else apart from at the ‘Treaty Ports’. In his analysis of the Opium Wars, Hsin-Pao Chang suggests that many of the difficulties of negotiation between Britain and China stemmed from attitudes of inflexibility and arrogance on both sides:13 each felt the other to be inferior. Traditionally, all foreign powers in China were treated as suppliants to the emperor rather than as equals, while at the same time the majority of the British representatives showed little understanding or tolerance of Chinese customs. In their turn, the Chinese government made a considerable mistake in under-estimating British commercial power and military strength. In the event, native inhabitants resented the British presence, and sailors were frequently harassed and attacked. Contemporary British histories of China14 emphasized the strangeness, backwardness and innate peculiarities of the Chinese people, and many wrote sanctimoniously of opium-smoking as if it was a native Chinese vice, conveniently ignoring their own country’s involvement and the East India Company’s blatant promotion of the trade. 9 They had lost the monopoly in the 1830s, but were still in practice chief importers of opium. 10 For the opium income earned by the East India Company, see the tables set out by Hsin-Pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 222–3. 11 See Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (London: Hutchinson, 1975), pp. 74–6. 12 David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–1914 (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 62–3. 13 Chang, pp. 214–15. 14 Such as the anonymous Ancient and Modern History of China (London: Edward Gover, 1840), and William Langdon, Ten Thousand Things relating to China and the Chinese (London, 1842).

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Given these disparate sets of circumstances involving British political relations with both the Ottoman Empire and with China, it is likely that the evidence of the two nations’ presence at the Great Exhibition may reveal considerable differences in the ways in which both nations were regarded by the British, and that their own attitudes to the Exhibition may also have differed. The Ottoman Empire at that time included, among other countries, Tunisia and Egypt as well as Turkey, so that the former countries’ artefacts and manufactures, a small number of which were also on display, were classified with the Turkish items. However, the Turkish display was by far the largest with, according to the Short Version of the Official Catalogue ‘upwards of 3,300 objects’,15 of which approximately 1300 were ‘manufactures’ and the rest raw materials. The latter, which included a range of natural specimens of the kind typically seen at the Exhibition such as plants, minerals and animal skins, excited little comment. Of the former, it was the costumes, silk textiles and embroideries which attracted most attention, although leather, ceramics, glass, metalwork, woodcarvings and jewellery were also exhibited. Egypt’s contribution16 of approximately 500 items was housed separately, consisting of 300 raw materials and 200 manufactured goods, which comprised textiles, leather, silver and books. Tunisia’s exhibits were similar in character, but, according to the floor plan of the Exhibition, they clearly presented a problem of where to display them as they shared a space with Brazil. All the Turkish, Egyptian and Tunisian exhibits had been imported directly from their countries of origin and had been chosen by native officials to represent the works of their country. A pamphlet, Information for the Use of Foreign Visitors,17 published in July 1850, noting that commissioners were being appointed abroad to promote the Exhibition and seek exhibits, listed thirteen appointed to the Ottoman Empire, twelve of whom were native Turks. The President of the Commission was Ismail Pasha, the Minister for Commerce. It is clear from this that the Ottomans were keen to be involved with the Exhibition, and further evidence of this official interest is provided by the Minutes of the Proceedings of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Exhibition, which stated that the Turkish Commission had sent a circular concerning the forthcoming Exhibition to the authorities of all the provinces of the empire.18 By contrast, it is noticeable that there was no commission appointed to China, and that the Chinese objects, as they appear in the catalogues, originated from entirely different types of sources. Here, the list of suppliers included ‘HM Consul Shanghae’ (sic), the East India Company, other British firms of importers of ‘Chinese and other fancy goods’, and in particular a ‘Messrs. 15 Short Version of the Official Catalogue (London, 1851), pp. 316–18. 16 Ibid., pp. 217–19. 17 Public Record Office document: PRO, BT 342/1, no. 315. 18 Minutes of the Proceedings of HM’s Commissioners for the Exhibition (London: HMSO, 1851), pp. 286–90.

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Hewetson’s China Warehouse’, whose name appeared on the display next to that of China itself, and in type of the same size, giving it equal prominence.19 There was also a whole series of British private collectors of Chinese arts. The raw materials were supplied by the consul and by the East India Company, while the other importers and private collectors provided the art objects, which comprised porcelain, textiles, jade, furniture, bronzes, ivory, lacquer and silk paintings. It is significant to note, although it is suggested by the use of such phrases as ‘old bronze wares’20 that some of the exhibits were antiques, that no real distinction was made between the antique and contemporary objects, so that it is impossible to discern how many of each there may have been. It is also noteworthy that although the vast majority of these items were described as Chinese, a few ‘Japanese wares’ are also included in the list, suggesting that the arts of both countries were somewhat interchangeable in the minds of the Exhibition organizers. These are indicative of both a lack of knowledge and a lack of artistic interest in the objects, as well as implicitly suggesting that there was no difference between past and present in Chinese arts. This was a commonly expressed prejudice with regard to the Chinese people in general, which will be discussed in more detail below. Catherine Pagani has pointed out that during the 1840s, Chinese art, due to a series of exhibitions in London, was admired in Britain even while the Chinese people themselves were regarded with a combination of amusement and curiosity as mysterious and outlandish.21 Richard Altick has described the success of these exhibitions, one of which also toured in the provinces.22 By 1851, then, Chinese arts could not in themselves have been completely unfamiliar to the British, and therefore the tokenistic and off-hand treatment of the arts in the Great Exhibition, and the paucity of attention paid to China in the official documentation, must be due to other factors. When it came to prizes, Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia between them were awarded a small number, twenty-seven, out of a total of approximately 2500 overall.23 Of these twenty-seven prizes, several went to the Ottoman Sultan 19 This appears in one of the illustrations in the anonymous souvenir Recollections of the Great Exhibition (London: Lloyd and Co., 1851), n.p. This is a book of lithographs, without accompanying text. 20 J. Tallis, History and Description of the Crystal Palace 1851 (London, 1851), vol. 1, pp. 214–16. 21 Catherine Pagani, ‘Chinese Material Culture and British Perceptions of China’, in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 28–41. 22 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 292–4. The most important of these exhibitions was held in 1841, mounted by an American, and consisted of over a thousand objects housed in Hyde Park in a specially constructed pagoda. Another, smaller display was held in 1847, while in 1848 a junk, illegally purchased in China by an Englishman, sailed from Hong Kong with its native crew and moored on the Thames, exciting much comment. 23 Public Record Office document PRO, BT 342/3, no. 975 is a scrapbook of Great Exhibition information, which includes official pamphlets and newspaper cuttings. On

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himself, one to the Pasha of Egypt ‘for a very valuable and extensive collection illustrating the manufactures and natural resources of Egypt’,24 and one to the Bey of Tunis for a similar collection.25 According to Henry Cole,26 another medal should have been awarded to the empire, specifically to Egypt, for exhibiting a catalogue of all the books published there. He commented, Most … European governments have wished for a printed catalogue of their national literature, and here is a semi-civilized nation setting the first example …

China, on the other hand, took only two prizes, one being awarded to a Captain Shea for a collection of carvings, and another to ‘Yun Kee of Shangae’27 for silk. It is interesting to note that the name of the latter exhibitor, notable for being Chinese as opposed to European like all the other contributors named, does not appear in the official catalogue. It is an indication that there may have been a small number of objects which originated directly from a Chinese source, but that these must have been a tiny minority, since they were not considered worthy of inclusion. The combination of the different sources of objects and the different ways in which they are described and categorized suggests that both very different sets of attitudes were in operation towards the Ottoman Empire and China, and also that these nations themselves had different attitudes towards sending exhibits. Of the numerous catalogues and souvenirs which accompanied the Exhibition, many did not mention either nation, or if they did, referred to them only in passing. However, the Official Catalogue included a separate Catalogue of the Turkish Section,28 which provided commentary on the exhibits. Here there is little aesthetic opinion expressed by the anonymous author concerning the artefacts, and the introductory remarks are more concerned with other issues. The writer notes that Turkey has always been considered a ‘non-industrial country’, dependent on Britain and other countries for the majority of their imports. However, recently, the sultan, ‘with the most praiseworthy intentions’, had been attempting to ‘revive the old manufactures’ of the country ‘by the introduction of new working establishments on a large scale and at his own private cost’ in order to give ‘fresh impetus to the industry of his country’. Time will show the wisdom of this policy, the commentator continues, as Turkey will soon become self-sufficient. He approves of the sultan’s views, considering him:

pp. 2606–723 of this volume is the list of prizes, with between 20 to 25 individual awards listed on each page. This gives an approximate total of 2500 prizes. 24 Public Record Office document PRO, BT 342/3, no. 975, p. 2606. 25 Public Record Office document PRO, BT 342/3, no. 975 26 Henry Cole, On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1851), p. 438. 27 PRO, BT 342/3, no. 975, p. 2613. 28 Catalogue of the Turkish Section (London, 1851).

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… enlightened … the ancient, narrow prejudices of his predecessors are fast fading … Nothing so much conduces to the progress and prosperity of a nation as the certain knowledge of the condition, prospects and influences of the commercial policy of other countries with whom that country may be in relation, and Turkey has provided one of the surest means to this end … by sending young men to Europe …29.

Western education for Turkish youth, this author considers, will continue to improve the rate of progress in Turkey. Another guide to The Great Exhibition of the World’s Industry held in London in 185130 also alludes to the empire’s political relationship with Britain: There is a natural interest in the industry and productions of an empire the condition of which must always be regarded by the Englishman as of vital importance. Turkey justly looks to Great Britain as one of the foremost, the sincerest and the most potent of her allies and friends …31.

In other passages, this writer makes approving comments concerning modern Ottoman government, despite some ‘irregularities’, and also notes the recent improvements in Egyptian commerce and administration.32 Such remarks, praising the Ottoman Empire’s incipient Westernization, reflect absolutely the opinions on this subject in the other contexts referred to above. In British eyes, the Sultan had recognized the need to ‘progress’ as the British would define the term, in the sense of becoming more Europeanized, and thus, although it is considered obvious that the empire is a long way behind Britain in its level of progress, it is entitled to approval because it has acknowledged that it needs to learn from European example, and is making headway in doing so. Other types of commentary on the exhibits of the Islamic world were also in evidence, where politics were of less overriding concern than domestic British issues. Some of the organizers of the Great Exhibition were key figures among those working towards design reform who, both during and after the event, expressed considerable anxiety over the poor quality of contemporary British design. The prevailing fashion in British decorative arts at the time was for naturalistic and historicist styles, which, while elaborately executed using a variety of new technologies, were poorly designed, taking no account of the form or use of the object itself. Ralph Nicholson Wornum, in his essay in the Exhibition Catalogue on The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste, summed up the problem as:

29 Ibid., p. 1. 30 William Gaspey, The Great Exhibition of the World’s Industry held in London in 1851, 4 vols (London: John Tallis and Co., 1851). 31 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 42. 32 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 43 and vol. 3, pp. 147–8.

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… want of originality … [and] … the very general mistake that quantity of ornament implies beauty … many objects being so overloaded with details as to utterly destroy the genuine individuality and expression of the object …33.

On the other hand, many of the contemporary design elite deeply admired the objects in the Exhibition from the Eastern world. The Indian artefacts were considered most noteworthy, but those from Turkey and North Africa were also praised. Owen Jones, best known for his championing of Islamic arts, famously commented when he published his Grammar of Ornament a few years later on the ‘principles’, ‘unity’, ‘truth’, ‘skill and judgment’, ‘elegance and refinement’ exemplified by the Oriental objects from the Great Exhibition.34 Others prominent in the cause of design reform were also enamoured, purchasing objects for students at the Government School of Design to study, thus forming part of the collection later to become the South Kensington Museum. However, it is important to emphasize that the qualities in the Eastern artefacts of which they most approved were not the same as those cited by mainstream commentators on the Exhibition. Whereas the latter emphasized signs of incipient Westernization as the most laudable qualities in the non-European exhibits, the design reformers admired the opposite, and strove to look for pure, ancient, Oriental qualities in Eastern design, expressing disappointment when native art-forms showed signs of having become altered in response to Western influences. For example, while Owen Jones gives the impression, in The Grammar of Ornament, of approving all Islamic design over Western in general, he singles out the Turkish for particular criticism, and considers that the Turkish arts in the Great Exhibition were ‘the least perfect of all the Mohammedan exhibiting nations’ because the Turkish style had become ‘debased’ through its mixture with European forms. The Turks, he opines, were ‘the first of the Mohammedan races to abandon the traditional style of building of their forefathers’.35 Jones also comments on a publication by his colleague and fellow-architect Matthew Digby Wyatt, another Eastern art enthusiast, who had chosen to illustrate some examples of Turkish embroidery in his work on the decorative art exhibits of 1851.36 Wyatt compares the Turkish works to Indian embroideries, noting that the Indian was superior because it followed more perfectly the ‘principles of ornamentation’.37 This illustrates that there was a wide divergence of interests expressed in the commentaries on the Ottoman Empire and its arts, which may be summed up as differing attitudes to progress. The Victorian concept of ‘progress’ is a 33 Ralph Nicholson Wornum, ‘The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste’, The Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of All Nations (London: Art Journal, 1851), p. VI***. 34 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856), p. 140. 35 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 36 Matthew Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Illustrations of the Choicest Specimens Produced by Every Nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of 1851 (London, 1851–53). 37 Ibid., p. 63.

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complex one, encompassing, in almost all cases, a firm belief in Western racial superiority, and the belief that mankind would inevitably progress towards a better, more advanced state in every sphere. This was also linked with attitudes towards technology, and a large proportion of the rationale behind the Great Exhibition was based around the idea that British primacy in technological achievement implied an overall British superiority. The loftiest possible idealism was attached to the Great Exhibition’s primary objectives: [It is] … peculiarly fitted to promote … a spirit of amity among all people. It invites the amiable intercourse of nations … it is fitted to teach men that the whole commercial world constitutes one vast community in which the true interests, advancement and well-being of the people are as mutual … as those of the people of any one nation.38

Despite such protestations of commercial brotherhood and equality, an important part of the purpose of all the foreign displays (even if not necessarily the only purpose) was to illustrate ‘types’ of nations as well as types of goods. Implicitly if not explicitly, the whole theme of the Exhibition was bound up with classification – a different specimen of every kind of object, natural product and person. In some contexts, it could be argued that, notwithstanding the ostensible motives of the breaking-down of national barriers, every foreign country represented at the Great Exhibition, whether European or nonEuropean, could be viewed as ‘other’ to Great Britain, since hers was the nation against which all others could be compared. In mainstream commentary, the Ottoman Empire fitted well into the implicit classification system, as an illustration of an evolving nation, which was in the process of becoming less an ‘other’ than a part of ‘us’ by means of its seemingly willing espousal of ‘progress’. Conversely, design stands out as one unique, important area where doubt entered this system of classification, and Western ‘progress’ was seen as a major disadvantage. The design reformers wanted to see an authenticity in Eastern artefacts, even if their conceptualization of this idea was self-centred, naïve and fatally flawed, since it is arguable that no art-form can ever not be subject to a degree of hybridization dependent upon circumstance, whether through conquest, colonization or pure commercial interchange. Nonetheless, it was felt that Eastern arts embodied a kind of national identity, a brand of genuineness lacking in the British design of the time. If anything, a vitally important part of the motivation behind the purchases of Eastern art objects from the Exhibition for what was to become the South Kensington Museum was the hope that this authenticity of identity could be understood, analyzed, and in some way ‘caught’ by example, as if by a mysterious process of osmosis. This is an intriguing paradox within the narrative of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in operation in other areas. In relation to Ottoman arts, the complaint by those like Owen Jones or Matthew Digby Wyatt, who wished to improve British design, was that they were not sufficiently ‘other’; 38 Alexander Ellis Pearce, Our Age and Our Country (London, 1851), p. 66.

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that the osmosis had in fact worked in reverse. The arts of Turkey did not express the idealized natural purity which other forms of Oriental arts were considered to embody, and thus could not impart authenticity to British arts in any way. Contradictorily, China is scarcely mentioned in the context of design reform, even though it was probably by far the most ‘authentic’ in the sense of being the least Westernized of all the Oriental nations represented in the Exhibition. Unusually, even Owen Jones, who in general is notable for his lack of racial stereotyping and for his willingness to allow the greatest possible artistic ability to non-European nations, has little to say concerning the Chinese exhibits, and does little more than repeat standard prejudices about the Chinese people and their arts as being incapable of progress in any direction. In The Grammar of Ornament, he notes that in terms of their art the Chinese … do not appear to have gone beyond that point which is reached by every people in an early stage of civilization: their art, such as it is, is fixed, and is subject neither to progression nor retrogression.

He allows that the Chinese possess ‘the happy instinct of harmonising colours’, but concludes that they exhibit in their decoration ‘… only just so much art as would belong to a primitive people …’, and that the art, like the people, is ‘peculiar’, ‘odd’ and ‘unimaginative’.39 One of the few other commentaries which expresses any detailed opinion concerning the Chinese artefacts states, ‘The Chinese have long been famous for their caprices of invention and whimsicalities of workmanship’, and describes the elaborate carving on some small ivory balls only in terms of the pointless effort expended on frivolous ‘toys’: ‘the Chinese are capable of wasting any amount of time on any triviality’.40 In this way, even their skill in carving is belittled, as though the writer is determined to view everything he sees in an unfavourable light, and to damn with faint praise wherever possible. In terms of degrees of ‘otherness’, in all contexts China gives the impression of being seen as the most ‘other’ of all the foreign nations at the Exhibition, the strangest and the most ‘foreign’ despite the popular exhibitions of Chinese artefacts during the previous decade. From the evidence of the catalogues and souvenirs, it seems clear that almost all the artefacts in the show had been provided by British individuals or export companies, and that there was little or no actual contact with the Chinese state over the exhibits. Even in illustrations of the Chinese section,41 quite apart from the prominence given to the name of ‘Hewetsons’ in the Exhibition signage referred to above, the display appears sparse: there are a few large vases, some hanging lanterns, a decorative screen; but the (anonymous) illustrator appears to have been somewhat at a loss for a central focus for the picture, since this space is occupied, incongruously, by a piece of Western, classical-style statuary resembling Venus and Cupid. 39 Jones, pp. 86–7. 40 Gaspey, The Great Exhibition of the World’s Industry, vol. 1, pp. 232–3. 41 Recollections of the Great Exhibition (London: Lloyd and Co., 1851), n.p.

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A British family is depicted by the side of this work (which is not mentioned in any commentary), examining the display. A new emperor, Hsien-feng, had ascended the throne of China in 1850. He took a determinedly anti-foreign line, particularly towards the British, and was resolved to cooperate with them as little as possible. In addition, the country had considerable internal political problems to contend with, and it is therefore hardly surprising that sending art objects to a British exhibition was not remotely a priority at that time.42 However, in British terms, despite the concessions the Chinese had been obliged to make after the Opium War, they were refusing to allow more Westernization than absolutely necessary, indeed were attempting to thwart it at every turn, and this implied that the Chinese race was obviously backward, stuck in the past, and thus unable to progress. While it is true that many Chinese systems were highly conservative and therefore out of step with the modern ‘progressive’ world, Sino-British relations were chiefly characterized by their refusal to acknowledge the Western way as superior. Apart from the dismissive attitude expressed in the Exhibition souvenirs, anti-Chinese prejudice also stands out as particularly virulent in the unofficial publications, although these are notable for their generalized xenophobic prejudices. Jeffrey Auerbach43 has commented appositely upon the savagely satirical poem An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission Sent to Report on the Great Exhibition, 44 which purports to be the narrative of a Chinese visitor to the Exhibition to his emperor back home. It repeats all the standard prejudices about Chinese backwardness, stupidity and bloodthirstiness, and is backed up with appropriately outlandish cartoons. Punch too was eloquent in its satire. Richard Pearson45 has discussed the relentless gibes in the Punch cartoons aimed at many different groups of visitors to the Exhibition whether for their race or their class, backing up the supposition that every nation could be considered in some senses ‘other’. However, Pearson does not discuss any one racial group in detail, nor notes the particular emphasis on the outlandishness of the Chinese, who, in one cartoon are offered bird’s nest soup, rat pie and dogs to eat at a ‘London Dining Rooms’.46 Later, Punch opines that most of the ‘Chinamen’ around London at present cannot be genuine, and suggests that:

42 Emperor Hsieng-feng reigned from 1850 to 1861. For a discussion of his reign and Chinese domestic politics in the mid-nineteenth century, see Immanuel Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 6th edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 203 and 221–5. 43 Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 174–9 44 Henry Sutherland Edwards, An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission Sent to Report on the Great Exhibition (London, 1852). 45 Richard Pearson, ‘Thackeray and Punch at the Great Exhibition’, in Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 179–205. 46 Punch, 20 (1851), ‘Punch’s Almanack’, p. x, a cartoon entitled ‘International Visitors at a London Dining Rooms, 1851’.

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There ought to be some authority given to detect a counterfeit Chinaman in the same way as a counterfeit sixpence, by snipping off his tail, or trying the effect of soap and water on his countenance …47.

The mention of ‘tails’, although it refers to the Chinese wearing of their hair long in a pigtail, also has resonances of animality. By contrast, visitors from the Arab world get off lightly, since the most uncivilized representation seen of them in Punch is of a pair of Arabs/Turks fighting on camel-back as they ride down Rotten Row.48 In conclusion, the Ottoman Empire was not, in the context of the Great Exhibition, nor at this period of time in general, a representation of the kind of ‘other’ defined by Edward Said. Examination of nineteenth-century British attitudes to the Ottoman Empire in fact complicates the theories proposed by individuals like Said, that Islamic nations always represented absolute, irrevocable otherness to the British during this time. Evidence examined suggests that otherness was more fluid and complex. Views of the Turks, in terms of their supposed national characteristics, actually varied greatly depending both on the author’s own standpoint and on the date at which the individual was writing. At the time of the Great Exhibition, politically speaking it was the Russians who were most often compared with the Turks, and seen as far more ‘other’ in terms of representing the most undesirable intrinsic character traits possible. For instance, Fullarton, the contemporary historian of the Ottoman Empire, states as fact that in wars between Turkey and Russia the latter are ‘always’ the aggressors, as the ‘Russian nature’ is ‘cruel, savage and cunning’.49 In 1851, the Ottoman Empire, for British commentators, was aligned more with ‘us’ than with the Russian ‘them’. This remained the case until the Bulgarian crisis of 1876,50 at which point, because of the brutal Turkish response to the Bulgarian uprising, the Turks were vilified in the most extreme terms, both national and racial. On the other hand, in the following year Turkey was defeated in battle by Russia, after which the Russians once more assumed the role of arch-villain in Britain.51 In all cases, however, it could be argued that the opinions were based more on the vagaries of politics than on any fixed qualities, and were thus shifting and unreliable. As far as China is concerned, Pagani has suggested that the British were ‘bored’ with Chinese art because it had shown no signs of ‘progressing’ since the exhibitions of the 1840s, any more than, in contemporary terms, had the people themselves,52 and that this accounts for the disappointment and derision expressed over the Great Exhibition display. However, although the 47 Punch, 21, p. 86. 48 Punch, 20 (1851), ‘Punch’s Almanack’, p. xv. 49 Fullarton, p. 7. 50 For a typical view of the extreme British anti-Turkish feeling at this time, see William Ewart Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London, 1876). 51 See Yapp, pp. 78–81. 52 Pagani, p. 39.

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evidence does back up this viewpoint, there is, arguably, more to say than this concerning the role the Chinese played at the Exhibition. On a scale of otherness, they occupied an extreme position, even though the nation which occupied that particular position could be subject to change over time. In several of his essays in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha has discussed many complex psychological insecurities raised by questions of the self/other divide.53 Adapting Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory of mimicry, Bhabha argues that the colonizer, attempting to make the colonized into his own image in order to reassure himself of his own identity, is in fact not reassured because what he sees reflected back, as in a mirror, is both like and unlike himself. Both the difference and sameness of the image are potentially threatening to the colonizer; therefore, all colonial relationships are ambivalent and potentially contradictory. Although Great Britain was not a colonizer of the Ottoman Empire and had only gained a relatively small foothold in China in 1851, there is a sense in which between them these two nations represented two halves, the reassuring and the disquieting, of the image in the mirror. In one sense both China and Ottoman Turkey were like Britain in that they were both imperial powers, even though they were at the same time also utterly unlike her. The Ottoman Empire was of a nature which was at this point less of an ‘other’ through its Westernization being interpreted as an acknowledgement of Western ways as preferable and superior. China, on the other hand, was fighting the need for engaging with Westernization and, as an ancient imperial power, was still seeing itself as inherently superior. This was contradicting the predominant British worldview through resembling too much its own view of itself and thus threatening its own sense of superiority. Therefore, China was far more alien and ‘other’ than the Ottoman Empire through its very determination to remain so. This represented a striking anomaly and contradiction to the paternalistic declarations of universal brotherhood which were the stated aims behind the entire Exhibition. In Culture and Imperialism, Said commented that ‘nations themselves are narrations’.54 Nowhere is this borne out more emphatically than by Britain’s view of itself during the Great Exhibition. China’s refusal to cooperate short-circuited and undermined Britain’s own narration of itself at this time. With regard to Turkey, a diplomatic exchange was taking place through the medium of the Exhibition. The Ottomans had sent the products of their country that they had chosen to represent themselves, and had an expedient interest at this point in being allied with those whom they had always regarded as their own ‘others’. At the same time, the British had interests in being allied with Turkey, for equal reasons of expediency, and were both reassured by the evidence of cooperation, and bolstered by the apparent signs of emulation which they saw. Those among the Exhibition organizers more interested in the artistry of the Turkish goods were seeking ‘otherness’ for entirely different 53 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See, for example, ‘The Other Question’, pp. 66–85, and ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, pp. 85–93. 54 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii.

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reasons: hoping to find elements of an idealized other to incorporate into their own definition of the self. As a consequence, they were less reassured than disappointed by the signs of Westernization they encountered. As far as the Chinese display was concerned, what was exhibited had little to do with China at all. As a nation, China was emphatically uninterested in engaging with a Western enterprise like the Exhibition. As a result the section had little coherence, but had been cobbled together by British agency in order to give an illusion of completeness, so that their own narration of Britain as the centre of the world, to which all other nations would come, could remain intact.

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Select Bibliography English-Language Secondary Sources Anderton, Paul, ‘Staffordshire and the Setting up of the Great Exhibition’, Staffordshire Studies, 9 (1997), pp. 35–68. Anthony, Joseph, Joseph Paxton: An Illustrated Life of Sir Joseph Paxton, 1803–1865 (Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1973). Armstrong, Isobel, ‘Mythmaking: Cinderella and her Glass Slipper at the Crystal Palace’, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 204–21. Atterbury, Paul, ‘The Court of a Master: Pugin’s Design for the Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition in 1851’, Perspectives in Architecture, 1 (1994), pp. 34–6. Auerbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Bailey, Sydney D., ‘Parliament and the 1851 Exhibition’, Parliamentary Affairs, 4 (1950–51), pp. 311–24. Barton, Su, ‘“Why Should Working Men Visit the Exhibition?”: Workers and the Great Exhibition and the Ethos of Industrialism’, in Ian Inkster, Colin Griffin, Jeff Hill and Judith Rowbotham (eds), The Golden Age: Essays in British Social and Economic History, 1850–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 146–63. Beaver, Paul, The Crystal Palace, 1851–1936: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970). Bellon, Richard, ‘Science at the Crystal Focus of the World’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lghtman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 301–35 Bennett, Jim, Science at the Great Exhibition (Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1983). Bird, Anthony, Paxton’s Palace (London: Cassell, 1976). Bonython, Elizabeth, ‘The Planning of the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 143 (1995), pp. 45–8. _______, and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2003). Briggs, Asa, ‘Exhibiting the Nation’, History Today, 50/1 (2000), pp. 16–25. _______, ‘The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851’, in Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 15–51. Brown, Vicky, and Ian Inkster, ‘Estimating a Public Sphere: Intellectual and Technical Associations at the Time of the Great Exhibition’, in Inkster et

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al. (eds), The Golden Age: Essays in British Social and Economic History, 1850–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 164–74. Butt, John, ‘Bleak House in the Context of 1851’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 10 (1955), pp. 1–21. Buzard, James, Joseph Childers and Eileen Gillooly (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Clemm, Sabine, ‘“Amidst the Heterogeneous Masses”: Charles Dickens’ Household Words and the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 27 (2005), pp. 207–30. Colquhoun, Kate, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). Colvin, Peter, ‘Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the School of Oriental and African Studies Library’, Libraries & Culture, 33 (1998), pp. 249–59. Cunliffe, Marcus, ‘America at the Great Exhibition of 1851’, American Quarterly, 3 (1951), p. 115–26. Dalzell, Robert F., American Participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 1960). Davis, John R., The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). De Mare, Eric Samuel, London, 1851: The Year of the Great Exhibition (London: Folio Society, 1972). Fay, Charles Ryle, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Ffrench, Yvonne, The Great Exhibition, 1851 (London: Harvill Press, 1951). Gibbs-Smith, Charles Harvard, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Commemorative Album (London: HMSO, 1950). Golby, John M., and Scott Meikle, The Great Exhibition and Re-reading Hard Times (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1986). Greenhalgh, Paul, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Haltern, Utz, ‘The Society of Arts and Some International Aspects of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Parts I and II’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 116 (1968), pp. 539–42 and 620–22. Hare, David, The Great Exhibition (London: Faber, 1972). Hix, John, The Glass House (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). Hobhouse, Christopher, 1851 and the Crystal Palace (London: John Murray, 1937). Hobhouse, Hermione, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry. A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: Athlone Press, 2002). Hoffenberg, Peter H., ‘Equipoise and its Discontents: Voices of Dissent during the International Exhibitions’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise: Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 39–67.

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Hopkins, Chris, ‘Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition’, in Gary Day (ed.), Varieties of Victorianism: The Uses of a Past (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 40–62. Johansen, S., ‘The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Precipice in Time?’, Victorian Review, 22 (1996), pp. 59–64. Keller, Nancy B., ‘Illustrating the “Reports by Juries” of the Great Exhibition of 1851: Talbot, Henneman, and their Failed Commission’, History of Photography, 6 (1982), pp. 257–72. Kesteven, G. R., 1851: Britain Shows the World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968). Kihlstedt, Folke T., ‘The Crystal Palace’, Scientific American, 251 (1984) pp. 132–43. King, Edmund, ‘The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and its Publications’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 144 (1996), pp. 58–62. King, George S., ‘Music and the Great Exhibition’, Tempo, n.s. 19 (1951), pp. 7–11. Kriegel, Lara, ‘The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 146–78. Langdon-Davies, John, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Collection of Documents (London: J. Cape, 1968). Leapman, Michael, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001). Litvak, Leon, ‘Exhibiting Ireland, 1851–53: Colonial Mimicry in London, Cork and Dublin’, in Litvak and Glenn Hooper (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin: Four Courts, Press, 2000), pp. 15–57. Lubbock, Jules, ‘Design Reform and the Great Exhibition’, in Lubbock (ed.), The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 248–70. Luckhurst, Kenneth W., The Great Exhibition of 1851: Three Cantor Lectures (London: Royal Society of Arts, 1951). Lutchmansingh, Larry D., ‘Commodity Exhibitionism at the London Great Exhibition of 1851’, Annals of Scholarship, 7 (1990), pp. 203–16. MacTaggart, Ann and Peter (eds), Musical Instruments in the 1851 Exhibition: A Transcription of the Entries of Musical Interest from the “Official Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of Art and Industry of All Nations”, with Additional Material from Contemporary Sources (Welwyn: Mac & Me, Ltd, 1986). McKean, John, Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox (London: Phaidon Press, 1994). McKendry, V., ‘Hegemony at Home: Queen Victoria and the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 24 (1997), pp. 89–104. Miller, Andrew H., ‘Spaces of Exchange: Interpreting the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 50–90.

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Morris, R. J., ‘Leeds and the Crystal Palace’, Victorian Studies, 13 (1970), pp. 283–300. Musgrave, Michael, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Oliver, Richard, ‘The Ordnance Survey and the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Map Collector, 50 (1990), pp. 24–8. Pelli, Cesar, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace’, Architecture and Urbanism, 2 (1980), pp. 3–14. Petroski, Henry, ‘The Amazing Crystal Palace’, Technology Review, 86 (1980), pp. 3–14. Pevsner, Nikolaus, High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibits of 1851 (London: Architectural Press, 1951). Physick, John, ‘Albertopolis: The Estate of the 1851 Commissioners’, in Chris Brooks (ed.), The Albert Memorial. The Prince Consort National Memorial: Its History, Contexts and Conservation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 308–38. Piggott, Jan R., Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854– 1936 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2004). Purbrick, Louise (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Richards, Thomas, ‘The Great Exhibition of Things’, in Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 17–72. Short, Audrey, ‘Workers Under Glass’, Victorian Studies, 10 (1966), pp. 193–202. Sparling, Tobin Andrews, The Great Exhibition: A Matter of Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1982). Swift, Anthony, ‘Russia and the Great Exhibition of 1851: Representations, Perceptions and a Missed Opportunity’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 55 (2007), pp. 242–63. Vlasta Vranjes, ‘English Cosmopolitanism and/as Nationalism: The Great Exhibition, the Mid- Victorian Divorce Law Reform, and Bronte’ s Villette Vlasta’, Journal of British Studies 47:2 (2008), 324-47. Walton, Whitney, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). Wedgwood, Alexandra, ‘The Mediaeval Court’, in Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright (eds), Pugin: A Gothic Passion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 237–45. Yagou, Artemis, ‘Facing the West: Greece in the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Design Issues, 19 (2003), pp. 82–90. Young, Paul, ‘“Carbon, Mere Carbon”: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace and the Mission to Make Sense of British India’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29/4 (December 2007), pp. 343–58. _______, ‘Economy, Empire, Extermination: The Christmas Pudding, the Crystal Palace, and the Narrative of Capitalist Progress’, Literature and History, 14 (2005), pp. 14–30.

Index

The Great Exhibition of 1851 is abbreviated to GE throughout the index, except for its own main entry. References to illustrations are in bold.

‘Abd-ul Mejid, Ottoman Sultan 193 Africans, Hegel on 25 Aguirre, Robert xiv Albert, Prince Consort 25, 36, 96, 157 Mansion House address xvi, 9, 27 support for Prussia 149–50 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, Phidias and the Parthenon Frieze 188 Altick, Richard 196 Ames, Kenneth, Death in the Dining Room 73 Anglobalization Ferguson on xvi, 5–6, 19, 25 and the GE xvi, 20, 25 Appadurai, Arjun xviii The Argus 101 Armstrong, Meg 29 Arnold, Matthew 36, 38 Culture and Anarchy 40–1 Art Journal 185 Auerbach, Jeffrey 22, 31, 78, 176–7, 202 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung 165 Australia Aboriginal models, Crystal Palace (Sydenham) 109–10 at the GE xiv, 93–120 Aboriginal artefacts, absence of 108–9 Aboriginal language materials 108 Australian public apathy 97 criticism of 93–5 exhibits finding 102 minerals 103

publications 103 raw materials 102, 103, 105 shipping of 99–100 wool 105, 106, 107 finance problems 98 Gigantic Lily 102 inadequate preparations 95–6 London agent 97, 98 exhibitions, participation in 110–11 identity problems 100, 106 natural history exhibits, Crystal Palace (Sydenham) 109 Austria at the GE 154–5, 156, 159 mid-nineteenth century, map 148 Prussia, rivalry 151, 152, 153, 155, 157 Baden 154 Balneavis, Lt Henry Colin 83, 84 Bastea, Eleni 175 Baumgartner, Andreas Ritter von 154 Bavaria 154 Bazley, Thomas 149 Belfast School of Design 64, 67, 75 Bell, Jacob 162 Bell, John A Daughter of Eve sculpture 180 The American Slave sculpture 180, 181 Bell, Leonard 84 Benjamin, Walter 38 Bennett, George 97 Bennett, Tony 182 Besteneck, Moriz Ritter von 154 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture 204 Blühm, Andreas 186–7 Bowring, John 147 Brees, S.C., Colonial Panorama, Linwood Gallery 84–5 Bremen, at the GE 155

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Bremer, Frederika 18–19 Britain China, attitudes to 193–4 design reform 198–9 Free Trade adoption (1846) 147, 150 global hegemony 5 Mechanics’ Institutes 164 Ottoman Empire, trade 178 Russophobia 135 British as global citizens 9–10 national identity x British Association for the Advancement of Science 11 British Empire, role of GE x Brunnov, Baron Filip 131, 132, 134, 137, 142 Bucher, Lothar 165–6 Bulgarian Crisis (1876) 203 Bunsen, Baron von 149, 150, 151 Burton, Antoinette 43, 44 Cannizzo, Jeanne xii Canton 194 capitalism and globalization 20 Wallerstein’s global model xvi, 19, 20 Caractacus as British/Celtic hero 50 Panormo’s sculpture 47–8, 49 Catlin, George 24 Central Working Class Committee (CWCC) 36–7 Challis, Debbie xv Chambers, Robert 36 Chang, Hsin-Pao 194 Chartist demonstrations 39 Chicago, Columbian Exposition (1893) 27, 111, 174 China arts 201 at the GE xvi, 191, 205 exhibits 201–2 art objects 196 reception 203–4 suppliers 195–6 prizes won 197 ‘progress’ 203 Punch on 202–3

British attitudes to 193–4 opium addiction 194 as other 201, 204 Clarke, Rev W.B. 96 Clifford, Sir Charles 88 Cobden, Richard 5, 7, 149 Cockerell, Charles 178 Cole, Henry xiv, xvi, 11, 36, 67, 96, 102, 147, 169, 197 on the GE 9 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 32, 33, 44, 89 colonialism, Stoler on 45 Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893) 27, 111, 174 Greek exhibits 190 commerce, Felkin on 18 “Communist Manifesto” 11, 21 Conrad, Joseph 19, 21 consumption, emphasis on, at GE 42 Cook’s Tours 32, 46 Cooper, Frederick xii Corn Laws, repeal 7, 147 Crafts, N.F.R. xi Crimean War (1853–6) 135, 193 Cruikshank, George 32 Crystal Palace (Hyde Park) criticism of 139 praise for 138–9 Crystal Palace (Sydenham) Aboriginal models 109–10 Assyrian Court 183 Australia, natural history exhibits 109 collections 182 destruction by fire ix Fines Arts Courts 182, 183 guidebooks 183–4 Greek Court 179, 182, 183, 184 arrangement 184–90 coloured exhibits, controversy 186–7 Parthenon model 184 Nineveh Court 184 origins 181 Pompeian Court 183 The Crystal Palace and its Contents 17, 18, 56–7, 178

Index Custine, Marquis de, Russia in 1839 123–4 criticism of 135 Davenport, Samuel 103, 104, 105 Davis, George R. 27 Davis, John R. xiii, 180 Davis, Mike 20 De La Beche, Sir Henry T. 103 De Quincey, Thomas 103, 106 de Valon, Alexis 123, 136 Defoe, Daniel 9 Delbrück, Rudolf 152 Denison, Sir William 104 design reform, Britain 198–9 Dickens, Charles 36, 37 Household Words 30, 33, 40 “The Noble Savage” 24 Don Pacifico affair (1850) 176 Dosteovsky, Fedor 139 Duncan, Carol 182 East India Company 17, 194, 195, 196 Eastern Question 192 Edinburgh Review 11, 135 Egan, Pierce, Life in London 31 Egypt, at the GE exhibits 195 books published 197 prizes won 197 Egyptian crisis (1830s) 192 exhibitions and colonial world order 27 as cultural texts xii as ideological institutions 37–43 as imperial propaganda 79 and national pride 27 as sites of cultural contact xii as virtual tourism 32–3 see also Great Exhibition 1851 exoticism 31 Fabian, Johannes 13–14 Fallmerayer, Jacob von, History of the Peloponnese 176 The Family Herald 23 Featherston, Sir Isaac 88 Fel’kerzam, Baron Gustav 138, 140 Felkin, William, on commerce 18

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Fellows, Charles 184, 185 Ferguson, Niall on Anglobalization xvi, 5–6, 19, 25 Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World 5 Fisher, David xiii flax production, Ireland 65, 67 Forster, John 36 Forster, William 18 The Closing of the Great Exhibition 10 Fourdinois, A.G., sideboard at GE 72, 73, 74 Fox, William Johnson 40 Frankfurt 152 Frederick William IV, King of Prussia 157 Free Economic Society Exhibition, St Petersburg (1850) 142–3 Free Trade British adoption (1846) 147, 150 German suspicion of 165 vs protectionism 150–1 Fullon, Ivan 127, 132, 142 furniture products, Irish, at GE 70–5 Gagemeister, Iurii 141, 143 Gallagher, John xvi German States at the GE 147–72 British commentaries 157–62 criticism of German industry 161–2 collaboration, non-Zollverein states 154 expectations 155–6 Free Trade, suspicion of 165 German commentaries 162–9 content 164–5 GE aesthetics, criticism 168–9 travel literature 166–8 volume of 162–3 impact 169–72 notable exhibits 158 reasons for interest 150–1 space problems 156 and successful firms 171–2 unification proposals 165 Britain

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

distrust of 157 industrial education, interest in 164 Confederation 151–2 modernization 151 see also Prussia; Zollverein customs union Germany, mid-nineteenth century, map 148 Ghillany, F.W., Tour nach Paris und London 166–7 Gibson, John The Greek Huntsman sculpture 178 Tinted Venus 180, 188–9 global hegemony, Britain 5 globalization and capitalism 20 GE as xvi, xviii, 3–25, 29 Great Exhibition 1851 (GE) aesthetics, Semper on 168–9 as anachronistic space xvi and Anglobalization xvi, 20, 25 ‘Ariel’s Girdle’, locomotive 15 Australia 93–120 see also Australia main entry and British economic primacy xi British Empire, role in x, xi and British national identity x catalogues 197–8 changing views of ix–x China see China main entry Cole on 9 consumption, emphasis on 42 English cosmopolitanism, reflection of 30 German States 147–72 see also German States main entry as global event x, xvi, xviii, 3–25, 29 Greece 173–90 see also Greece main entry A Guide to the Great Exhibition 52, 53, 67 Illustrated News on 36 as imperial propaganda 79 industrialization, role in xvii Ireland 52–75 see also Ireland main entry Irish Court, entrance 51 labour, absence of 42

liberalism, promotion of 160 modernization, role in xvii as museum 34–7 Native Americans 23–4 New Zealand 77–91 see also New Zealand main entry non-Europeans, representation 6 objectives 200 Official Catalogue 16, 52, 54, 55, 59, 77–8, 158–9, 197 opening ceremony 133 and otherness, creation of 29 Ottoman Empire see Ottoman Empire main entry Playfair’s classification xiv, 55–6 as political diversion 38–9 publications on 58–9 Punch on 6–7, 21 Queen Victoria’s visit 87 Reports by the Juries 55, 56, 59 Russia 123–45 see also Russia main entry security issues 157 ‘Shilling Days’ 37–8, 39 Society Islands 16 and space/time concepts 13–14 Stephenson on 7–8, 15 as synopsis of empire 46 Thackeray’s parody 35 in Tom Brown’s Schooldays 3 US Court 179 visitors, number of 42, 133 visuality 29–30 and the working classes 36–7, 39–40 xenophobia 23 Great Exhibition 1862, New Zealand at 87–8 Greece in Anglo-American literary imagination 176 at Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893) 190 at the GE xv, 173–90 classical bias 174–5 exhibits 176 folk crafts 177 natural products 177 reception 177–8 impact on Greece 190

Index independence, from Ottoman Empire 173, 175, 192 perception, as Oriental nation 174, 176 Greek Court see under Crystal Palace (Sydenham) Greeley, Horace 93 Greenhalgh, Paul 41, 90 Greenwood, Thomas, on museum culture 35–6 Grey, Sir George 80, 87 Gropius, Carl 153 Grüner, Ludwig 153 Haast, Julius 88, 89 Hamburg, at the GE 155 Hanover 152, 153, 172 at the GE 155 Harney, G. Julian 79 Harvey, David 13 Hatt, Michael 187–8 Haxthausen, August von, Studies on the Interior of Russia 124 Heaphy, Charles 83, 87 Hector, James 88 Hegel, G.W.F., on Africans 25 Hessen 154 Heydt, August von der 151 Hittorf, Jacob Ignaz, Restitution du Temple d’Empedocle 186 Hobhouse, Christopher ix Hobsbawm, Eric xi, 15 Hochstetter, Ferdinand von 88 Hock, Carl 154–5 Hoffenberg, Peter xi, xiii, xiv, 34, 173 Hoffmann, August Wilhelm 153 Holstein, at the GE 155 Hong Kong 194 Hooper, Glen 58 Hsien-feng, Emperor of China 202 Hughes, Thomas 18, 25 Tom Brown’s Schooldays 4 GE reference 3 Hunt, Robert, Hand-book to the Official Catalogue 158 Illustrated Exhibitor 40, 57, 58, 61 on Caractacus Unbound 47–8, 49 on Irish character 63–5

215

Irish Court entrance, GE 51 Illustrated London News 9, 28, 39, 58 on the GE 36 on Russia 135 Indian travellers 43, 44 industrialization, GE role in xvii Ireland at the GE xiii–xiv, 52–75 as ‘developing’ country 70 exhibits altar cloth 60 bog wood teapoy 69, 70, 71, 74 bog-yew group 68, 70 box top, Belfast School of Design 64 ‘Clarendon Ardoyne’ 66 embroidery 57–8 Fourdinois sideboard 72 furniture products 70–5 lace products 60, 61, 62 linen products 66, 67, 70 textile products 61–3 Famine, ignored 63 identity, ambiguities 58, 75 Irish Court, entrance 51 Music Temple 74 flax production 65, 67 post-Union regionalization 58 Irish character, Illustrated Exhibitor on 63–5 Irish Court, GE, entrance 51 Jenkins, Ian 186 Johnston, Ewan xvi, xvii Jones, Arthur, furniture at the GE 68–9, 70–1, 73, 74–5 Jones, Owen 184, 185–6 on Chinese arts 201 on Oriental objects in GE 199 on Turkish objects at the GE 199 works ‘An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court’ 186, 187 Grammar of Ornament 188, 199, 201 Kamenskii, Gavril 131, 133–4, 137 Kiselev, Pavel 126, 128, 129

216

Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Kiss, Auguste, Amazon sculpture 158 Kittary, Modest 133, 139, 140 Koshelev, Aleksandr 140, 142, 144 Koven, Seth 45 Kriegel, Lara 42 Kudernatsch, Joseph 155 Lacan, Jacques, mirror theory of mimicry 204 Layard, Austen Henry 184 Leech, John, Memorials of the Great Exhibition-1851 29 Leighton, Frederic 188 Levell, Nicky 182 Levshin, Aleksei 127, 128.129 Lewald, Fanny 168 England und Schottland 167 Lewes, G.H. 187 linen products, Irish, at the GE 66, 67, 70 List, Friedrich 165 Litvak, Leon, on Panormo’s Caractacus 48, 52 Lode, Eduard 142 London, City of xvi–xvii London, East End, poverty 45 London International Exhibition (1862) 94, 188 London Orphan Asylum 40 Luxembourg 154 Macarthur, William and James 96 McClellan, Andrew 37 McClintock, Anne xvi, 24, 79 Mahmud II, Ottoman Sultan 193 Manchester School of Economics 5 Maori people xvii representation of, at the GE 83–4 village, at Festival of Empire Exhibition 90 Marriott, John 45 Marx, Karl 167 on space/time compression 14 Maslov, Stepan 129 Mathur, Saloni 45 Mayhew, Henry 23 1851; or, the Adventure of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys 32–3, 39, 41

London Labour and the London Poor 30, 41 Mechanics’ Institutes, Britain 164 Melbourne Herald 101 Message, Kylie xvi Min, George 138–9, 140, 142 Mitchell, T.L. 97 modernization GE role xvii German States 151 New Zealand xvii Moore, Charles 96, 97 Moore, P.G. 83, 84 Morning Chronicle 137, 156, 159 Mort, T.S. 97 Moscow Agricultural Society xiii, 128, 129, 130 Muhammad ‘Ali defeat of Ottomans 192–3 Syria, invasion 192 Mukharji, T.N., A Visit to Europe 44 Munich Exhibition (1854) 170 museum as cultural text xii GE as 34–7 museum culture Greenwood on 35–6 Ruskin on 36 Nash, John 184 national identity, British, and the GE x national pride, and exhibitions 27 nationalism, rise of 43 nations, as constructs x Native Americans, at the GE 23–4 Navarino, Battle of (1827) 192 Nelson, Charmaine 180 Neukomm, Sigismund Ritter von 153 New Zealand at Festival of Empire Exhibition (1911) 90–1 Maori village 90 at the GE xvii, 77–91 exhibits art works 83 cereals 82 flax 81–2 indigenous 85, 86–7 Maori war pa 83

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Index minerals 80–1 miscellaneous items 82–3 timber 81 immigration, promotion of 84 Maori representation 83–4 at Great Exhibition (1862) 87–8 at international exhibitions 77 at Vienna International Exposition (1873) 88–9 identity construction 77 modernization xvii Museum of (Te Papa Tongarewa) 77 ‘Musket Wars’ 79 ‘Northern War’ 80 reinvention 89, 91 Newton, Charles 178, 185, 186, 187 Nicholas I, Tsar 123, 125, 135, 142 Nicholson, Charles 96, 97 Northern Star 42 Oldenburg 152, 153 opium addiction, China 194 Opium War (1840–41) 194, 202 Oriental artefacts, British admiration for 199 Orientalism, and otherness 191, 203 Osborne, Rev Sidney Godolphin 36 other China as 201, 204 Ottoman Empire as 203–4 Russia as 203 otherness creation of 34 and GE 29 and Orientalism 191, 203 Said’s concept xv, 203 Ottoman Empire at the GE 191, 203–5 Catalogue of the Turkish Section 197 as evolving nation 200 exhibits 195 identity issues 200–1 and balance of power 192 Britain, trade 178 British attitudes 192–3 defeat by Muhammad ‘Ali 192–3 Greek independence 173, 175, 192 as other 203–4

prizes won 197 ‘progress’ 198, 200 Russia, disputes 193 Tanzimat reforms xv, 193 Westernization 198

Owen, Richard 107 Pagani, Catherine 196, 203 Palmerston, Lord 149, 176, 192 Panormo, Constantine, Caractacus sculpture 47–8, 49, 58 as act of homage 50, 52 Litvak on 48, 52 Paris, Exposition Universelle (1855) 189 Parthenon model Greek Court, Crystal Palace (Sydenham) 184 Tennessee Centennial Exhibition (1897) 189 Paxton, Joseph 93, 132 Pearson, Richard 202 Peel, Robert 7 Penrose, F.C. 184, 187 Principles of Athenian Architecture 186 Peterson, Egor 134 Pevsner, Nikolas, High Victorian Design 71 Phillips, Watts, The Wild Tribes of London 31 Piggott, J.R. 186 Playfair, Lyon 162 GE classification system xiv, 55–6 Powers, Hiram, The Greek Slave sculpture xv, 174, 179 narrative context 180, 181 popularity 181 Punch parody 181 ‘Prehistoric Man’ 12–13 ‘progress’ China 203 Ottoman Empire 198, 200 textile production as 62 Victorian notion of 199–200 protectionism, vs Free Trade 150–1 Prussia at the GE, preparatory commission 152–3, 154

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Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Austria, rivalry 151, 152, 153, 155, 157 Prince Consort’s support for 149–50 see also Zollverein customs union Punch on the Chinese at the GE 202–3 on the GE 6–7, 21 cartoon 22–3 Greek Slave sculpture, parody of 181 ‘The Last Irish Grievance’ 59 Purbrick, Louise xiii, xiv racism Wallerstein on 22 xenophobia, distinction 22 Reaction of 1849 151 Redgrave, Richard 72 art at GE, report 162 Reichensperger, August von 168 Revolutions of 1848 151, 165, 171 Reynolds, Edward 42 Reynold’s Newspaper 42 Richards, Thomas xii Robinson, Ronald xvi Roessel, David, In Byron’s Shadow 176 Royal Ontario Museum xii Royal Society of Arts 65, 96 Royal Society for the Improvement of Cultivation of Flax in Ireland 65, 67 Ruapekapeka, Battle of (1846) 80 Ruskin, John, on museum culture 36 Russell, John Scott 147 Russia at the GE 123–45 art objects, lack of 130–1 awards won 142 exhibits chemical products 134 excluded items 131 finding 126–30 furniture 136, 138 minerals 134 setting up 133–4 textiles 134 identity questions 124 negative press coverage 137–8 official visitors 133 preparations 125–6

purpose of participation 135–6, 142, 143–4 reception 136–7 foreign perceptions of 123–4 Illustrated London News on 135 as other 203 Ottoman Empire, disputes 193 Russophobia, British 135 Said, Edward otherness concept xv, 203 works Culture and Imperialism 204 Orientalism 46, 191 St Petersburg News 136, 143 Samoilov, Leontii 140, 141, 142 Saxony 154 Schafhäutl, Professor 153 Scharf, George 184, 186 Schleswig Holstein, Anglo-German friction 151 sculpture, colouring controversy 186–9 Seeley, John xvi Semper, Gottfried, on GE aesthetics 168–9 Sherer, Aleksandr 134, 140, 141, 142 ‘Shilling Days’, at the GE 37–8, 39 Simart, Charles, Athena Parthenos 189 slavery American 181 Ottoman 181 Smiles, Sam, The Image of Antiquity 48, 50 Smith, Adam 18 Wealth of Nations 7 Smith, Dr Southward 36 Society Islands, products at the GE 16 Steinbeis, Ferdinand von 151, 164 Stephen, Alfred 96 Stephenson, Roberts, on the GE 7–8, 15 Stoler, Ann Laura xii, 45–6 on colonialism 45 Stroganov, Grigorii 127–8 Sydney Morning Herald 95, 98, 99, 102 Syria, Muhammad ‘Ali’s invasion of 192 Tallis, John on Australia at the GE 94–5, 102 on Australian Aborigines 108–9

Index Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace 16, 18, 23, 57–8, 74 on Irish lace 62, 63 Tanzimat reforms, Ottoman Empire xv, 193 Tennessee Centennial Exhibition (1897), Parthenon model at 189 Tenniel, John, Punch cartoon on GE 22–3 textile production, as ‘progress’ 62 Thackeray, Arnold 36 Thackeray, William Makepeace, GE parody 35 Thomas, Nicholas xvii time concepts, and the GE 13–14 Tolstoi, Count Fedor 130 Tomlinson, Charles, Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts 61, 65 Tunisia, at the GE exhibits 195 prizes won 197 Turkey see Ottoman Empire Twopeny, R.E.N. 107 US Court, at GE 179 Vanke, Francesca xv–xvi Victoria, Queen, visit to GE 87 Viehbahn, Georg von 152, 153 Vienna International Exposition (1873), New Zealand at 88–9 Waagen, Gustav Friedrich 153 Waitangi, Treaty of (1840) xvii, 79 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 80 Waldstein, Charles 190 Wallerstein, Immanuel

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model, global capitalism xvi, 19, 20 on racism 22 Ward, John 149 Watts, G.F. 187 Watts, Mary 187 Westmacott, Richard Jr 187 Whewell, William 14, 15, 17 on progress of nations 11–12 “The Results of the Exhibition” 34 Wilberforce, Samuel 36 Wilson, Daniel 13 Wilson, Shelagh 72 Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People without History x working classes, and the GE 36–7, 39–40 Wornum, Ralph Nicholson, The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste 198–9 Württemberg 154, 165, 171 Wyatt, Matthew Digby 185, 199 xenophobia in GE commentaries 23 racism, distinction 22 Yagou, Artemis 175 Young, Paul xvi Young, Robert 40, 41, 43 Zollverein customs union 149, 152 at GE exhibits industrial 158–9 publications 158 organizing conference 153 criticism of 160–1 creation of 147