Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

CONSUMING PASSIONS

Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

JUDITH FLANDERS

London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

For Andy

1945—2006

Wee but mighty

From the reviews of Consuming Passions:

‘Over the course of the nineteenth century, a whole new world opened up to an ever-growing section of the population—a world of retail choice, of travel for pleasure, of cultural and sporting diversion. It is a world explored with much wit and insight by Judith Flanders…The subject is a large one. Flanders, however, is excellent at showing the processes by which this general transformation was achieved…The themes that lie behind the narrative are interesting, and are well drawn out, but it is the details of the story that engage and entertain. They abound on every page…It’s a rich mix’

MATTHEW STURGIS, Sunday Telegraph

‘A panoramic view of a society and economy transformed by retail, travel and the production of inessential goods…This excellent study…is a major achievement’

JANE STEVENSON, Observer

‘An absorbing Gladstone bag of a book, from which curious items spill out in delightful profusion, some familiar, some very strange indeed…Flanders always leavens her statistics with descriptions and illustrations which bring her material vividly to life…[An] absorbing and scholarly study of the inexorable rise of consumerism’

Literary Review

‘Tlluminating…This excellent historical account is written with the sort of gusto that characterizes Cole, Wedgwood and the other heroes of Flanders’s book’

TLS

‘A deeply satisfying exploration of how the Victorians pursued their leisure time…Bursting with original research and statistics, it gives a panoramic view of Victorians at play’

Country Life

‘A fascinating look at the birth of leisure. The joy is in the details…Flanders has a real flair for humanising facts by grounding them in contemporary voices. If only all social history could be relayed with this much vitality’

Easy Living

‘Not only a scholarly compendium of facts about the way the Victorians spent their money, but also my favourite bedside reading of 2006’

JAN MORRIS, Books of the Year, Observer

‘Full of fascinating nuggets, this book puts our modern obsession with buying stuff firmly into context’

Time Out

‘A highly accessible [book] which moves seamlessly from one facet of the commercialisation of leisure to the next…The text is rich in reference to contemporary sources, as it is in fascinating detail…[Narrated] with admirable skill and an engaging enthusiasm’

BBC History magazine

‘An authoritative book, to be dipped into with pleasure’

The Tablet

‘Richly detailed…An impressive achievement, authoritative, serious and ambitious’

The Times

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

1 From Arcadia to Arcade: The Great Exhibition

2 ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-Century Shop

3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop

4 Read All About It: Buying the News

5 Penny a Line: Books and the Reading Public

6 To Travel Hopefully: Holidays and Tourism

7 The Greatest Shows on Earth?

8 Penny Plain, Tuppence Coloured: The Theatrical Spectacular

9 Going for a Song: The Music Market

10 Going, Going: Art and the Market

11 Sporting Life

12 Visions of Sugar Plums: A Christmas Coda

Appendices

APPENDIX 1 Currency

APPENDIX 2 Department stores (and other large shops) and their opening dates

APPENDIX 3 Holidays ‘kept at the Exchequer, Stamp-Office, Excise-Office, Custom-House, Bank, East-India, and South-Sea House’

Select Bibliography

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

In 1775, after a trip to Scotland, Dr Johnson wrote, ‘The true state of every nation is the state of common life…The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered, must the measure of general prosperity be taken.’¹ This seems to be such an unremarkable thought that to us it is scarcely worth saying. But before the nineteenth century it was a radical idea that prosperity, much less the true state of the nation, could be assessed by measuring the quantity and quality of the possessions of the nation’s inhabitants. The idea of a quantifiable ‘standard of living’ was as yet in embryo. By the time of the first ever World’s Fair, the Great Exhibition, held in London only seventy-six years later, the idea that one’s quality of life could be judged by the number of things one owned or consumed had come to be seen as natural: the consumer society had been born.

One of the ways of measuring the standard of living was by measuring possessions, but possessions did not necessarily have to be expensive or exclusive in order to be valuable to their owners. Dr Johnson’s equation of the state of the nation with the state of common life and the ‘measure of general prosperity’ came towards the start of the era of innovation which today we refer to as the Industrial Revolution, an era that finished towards the end of the nineteenth century, just as the phrase ‘standard of living’ came into general use. The Industrial Revolution calls to mind images of raw power, of steam engines, of coal and iron. But the first, and for much of the next century the most lucrative and technologically advanced, industry spawned by what we know as that revolution was the manufacturing of textiles—all that iron and steel, to create fashionable fabrics, pretty ribbons, lace and other fripperies that could in many cases be bought for a few pennies.

The Industrial Revolution saw not only the transformation of independent workshops into mammoth factories; it also saw the transformation of small shops into magnificent department stores. The period was one of increased buying and selling generally, and more particularly an increase in the quantity and quality of shops. The expansion of these new stores was frequently driven by new entrepreneurs, who generated previously unimaginable ways to stock them with new goods, new ways of displaying goods—plate-glass windows, gas lighting—and new ways of selling goods—money-back guarantees, advertising, discounts. By the end of the nineteenth century the Crown Princess of Greece was writing to her mother, ‘We spent I don’t know how many hours at Maple & Liberty! I screamed at the things to Tino’s horror, but they were too lovely! No, these shops I go mad in them! I would be ruined if I lived here longer!—Divine shops!!’² Not only were there ‘divine shops’, but new technologies in transport, from stagecoaches to canals to railways, brought the novelty of newspapers to tens of thousands more people, who could now read about what was available and what could be bought, encouraging them to acquire—or hope to acquire—more and more things.

But what the Industrial Revolution, and the new technologies that both drove it and were driven by it, produced was not just things—it was choice. Many items that had been undreamt of luxuries to the grandparents, or even the parents, of the children of the Industrial Revolution became conveniences; less than a generation later they were no longer even conveniences: they had become necessities. Living without sugar, without tea, without cotton, glass or cutlery became unimaginable to much of Britain’s population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, mass production of goods, improved distribution of those goods by new and faster forms of transport, promotion by advertising in newspapers and magazines, and new methods of retailing all combined to produce a seemingly endless stream of things that could be acquired by the consumer. It was not expensive rarities that created the new middleclass world of plenty and ease: it was the small comforts of hot, sweet drinks, or cheap and cheerful clothes—perhaps ultimately better symbols of the new world than all the machinery and technical ingenuity that made these items possible. As Gibbon noted in 1781, ‘The plenty of glass and linen has diffused more real comforts among the modern nations of Europe, than the senators of Rome could derive from all the refinements of pompous or sensual luxury.’³

But the consumer revolution was not only a matter of things. Commercial entertainment—the selling of leisure and pleasure—was also now accessible to the masses, creating myriad business opportunities. Theatre, opera, music-making; pleasure gardens and fairs; newspapers, magazines, books; holidays and tourism, seaside outings and excursion travel; spectator sports such as racing and football—in the nineteenth century these became available to many, who could increasingly afford to pay for their entertainment. No longer was the pub or the annual or monthly fair the prime venue for leisure. The age of mass entertainment had arrived, and the unruly crowd—avidly, enthusiastically—had become eager customers.

In Consuming Passions I have chosen to look not at the contents of the world of leisure, but at the containers: not at the literary merits (or otherwise) of books, newspapers and magazines, but at the availability of reading material; not at the subject matter of plays, but at staging and the technological development of theatrical presentation—at lighting, special effects and spectacle; at football and racing not as sporting competitions, but as paying spectator events.

Of course commercial leisure has always existed, in some form or another, but the masses previously had minimal access to much of it. The Industrial Revolution is often represented as having created a new world of commerce and commercialism; of factory routine, endless grind, and dark, Satanic mills. It did that. But it also brought colour, light and entertainment. This new world is the one I want to visit.

1

From Arcadia to Arcade:

The Great Exhibition

THE 1ST OF MAY 1851. Prince Albert is on the dais, welcoming the throng to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Joseph Paxton’s extraordinary Crystal Palace, as it has swiftly been nicknamed, throws off sparks of light in the bright sunshine. The choir sings the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from the Messiah. It seems that all the doubt, turmoil and trouble of the previous decades has at last been overcome: machinery, technology and science are in the ascendant, and will set the world free. Britain, the world’s first industrial society, will lead the way into a glorious future, which can be seen, all mapped out, in the courts and aisles of the Crystal Palace.

The building itself is a triumph of technology: Paxton’s great innovation has been to design perhaps the world’s first—and definitely the world’s largest—prefabricated building, using in his cast-iron and glass structure principles previously applied only to engineering projects. The Crystal Palace, deep in Hyde Park, is a cathedral to the glories of industry, in which power and steam are deified: a twenty-four-ton lump of coal greets visitors at the entrance, a precursor to the steam engines, hydraulicpowered machinery, locomotives, looms, spinning machines, steam hammers and more inside.

Earlier that year The Times had reported a speech given by the Prince, in which he had held out an enticing vision of the future: ‘The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention…The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are intrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital.’¹ Others had less exalted ideas. Albert and his supporters and encouragers were concerned with the benefits, both moral and industrial, that were to be found in commercial endeavour, but, in the brave new world of free trade and capitalism, many more were content simply to enjoy, or profit from, the results of those endeavours. The Great Exhibition gave many their first taste of the mass market, a thrilling peek into a future of plenty and consumption. For the Great Exhibition brought with it more than merely machinery. It brought things—tens of thousands of things, things piled high in the aisles of the Crystal Palace; things representing the hundreds of thousands more things that were now being manufactured and could be purchased.

The organizers of the Great Exhibition had not meant it to be this way. The origins of the event could be found in many converging trends, but the one that was the most distinctive, the most British, was the club. The Goncourt brothers, those nineteenth-century Parisian novelists and diarists, mocked the national fondness for this institution: if two Englishmen were washed up on a desert island, they said, the first thing they would do would be to form a club.² Certainly, by the eighteenth century, clubs were seen as an integral part of the civilizing process in Britain. Joseph Addison, laying down the rules of urbane as well as urban living in the Spectator, wrote, ‘Man is said to be a Sociable Animal, and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of Clubs.’*³

Initially informal, sociable outings (the noun probably developed from the verb, from the custom of clubbing together to pay for dinners

After the closure of the Tatler, Addison and Steele founded the Spectator, which has been called ‘one of the most triumphant literary projects of the age’.⁴ It was published daily for the next twenty-two months, and transformed periodical writing in England. Addison wrote the first number, introducing the ‘Spectator’ himself—a wry observer of the foibles of polite life—who together with his friends formed a club whose members included the Whig merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, the elderly ladies’ man Will Honeycomb, and, ultimately the most famous, the country squire Sir Roger de Coverley.

and drinks), clubs gradually through the eighteenth century developed into a fairly constant form: they were on the whole private groups of men (almost always men), who met on a regular if not necessarily frequent basis, mostly in public places such as coffee houses, taverns, inns or pubs, where their meetings were given point by a focus on one specific aim, whether it was recreation, sociability, education, politics, or a shared profession.*

Soon these clubs expanded further into daily life. Addison wrote approvingly once more: ‘When [men] are thus combined for their own Improvement, or for the Good of others, or at least to relax themselves from the Business of the Day…there may be something very useful in these little Institutions and Establishments.’⁶ By the mid eighteenth century there were possibly as many as 20,000 men meeting every night in London alone in some form of organized group. And it was not just London that had convivial meeting groups: by the early eighteenth century most provincial towns had a range of clubs, whether county societies, military groups, antiquarian or philosophical societies, or simple social clubs. Bristol, with a population of 50,000 in the 1750s, had bell-ringing, clergy, county, floral, political, musical, ‘Ancient Britons’, Masonic and charitable groups. Norwich, with 36,000 people, had bell-ringing, floral and clergy groups, as well as nine Masonic lodges, a natural-history society, a music society, uncounted sociable clubs, and nearly fifty benefit societies. Oxford had a ‘catch’ club—for ‘all true lovers of good fun, good humour and good music’—Irish clubs, Welsh clubs, a poetry and philosophical club, a bell-ringing club, an antiquarian society, and a number of Masonic lodges, dining clubs and social clubs—including the Eternal Club, the Jelly Bag Society, and the Town Smarts, whose members appeared in ‘white stockings, silver buckles, [with] chitterlings [shirt frills] flying, and hair in kidney’†—as well as the more common benefit, political, social, sporting, naturalhistory and college clubs. Even Northampton, with a population of only 5,000, managed a floral club, a Masonic lodge and a philosophical society.⁷ Though most of Scotland had barely any clubs, Glasgow and Aberdeen had a few, while Edinburgh had more than twenty with an occupational or other aim—religious, social, political, musical, antiquarian—and several that were purely social, like the Easy Club (founded in 1712) for ‘mutual improvement in conversation that [members] may be more adapted for fellowship with the politer part of mankind’.⁸ It was this thirst for self-improvement that motivated many club-goers.

By the end of the eighteenth century a change had taken place in some clubs. They became more tightly organized, with more rules, more organizers; they began to link themselves to other clubs with similar interests, for a less localized, more national sense of themselves; and many began to look at questions of social cohesion and discipline. Now it was not simply members whose behaviour was to be regulated by the rules of the organization: those members wanted in turn to regulate the behaviour of others. Charitable bodies, religious and civilreform societies all were set up in the coming years. A number of causes can be attributed to this shift: a series of bad harvests that led to hunger in the country, an influx of jobless immigrants into the cities, and fears of civil unrest; the beginning of the French wars after the fall of the Bastille in 1789; the continued rapid urbanization of society, which brought like-minded men into close proximity with each other, and also with those who were less blessed by worldly goods; the rise of Methodism and Dissenting faiths—all these forces joined together to produce a group of men who thought reform was desirable, and possible.

This may appear to be a long way from the Great Exhibition, but it was in Rawthmell’s Coffee House, in Covent Garden, that the first meeting of what ultimately became the Royal Society of Arts, the Exhibition’s spiritual parent, took place nearly a hundred years before, in 1754. The minutes of the ‘Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’ preserve the reforming zeal of its founders.⁹ The driving force was William Shipley, a drawing master and brother of the Bishop of St Asaph, who had published his intentions in a pamphlet entitled Proposals for raising by subscription a fund to be distributed in Premiums for the promoting of improvements in the liberal arts and sciences, manufactures, &c. At the first meeting of ‘noblemen, clergy, gentlemen and merchants’, the members considered

whether a reward should not be given for the finding of Cobalt in this Kingdom…It was also proposed to consider whether a Reward should not be given for the Cultivation of Madder in this Kingdom…It is likewise proposed, to consider of giving Rewards for the Encouragement of Boys and Girls in the Art of Drawing; And it being the Opinion of all present that ye Art of Drawing is absolutely Necessary in many Employments Trades, & Manufactures, and that the Encouragemt thereof may prove of great Utility to the public…

Their brief for prizes for ‘improvement’—that is, innovation—included industrial design and technological and scientific discoveries, as well as those things we now consider to fall more naturally into the domain of ‘art’. The cash premiums suggested for early prizes were considerable: £30 for the discovery of deposits of ore that contained cobalt (which produced a blue pigment that, before the creation of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century, was impossible to reproduce), and for the successful cultivation of the Rubia tinctorum plant for the production of madder (again for use in dyeing). There were to be two winners of the drawing prize—one for those under fourteen, one for fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds.* Each was to receive £15. At this time journeymen workers in the arts received weekly wages ranging from 3 to 6 guineas for a drapery-painter, to £1 10s. for an engraver, down to 15s. a week for a gilder, or 10 to 12s. for a colour grinder¹⁰. By 1758 the RSA was funding further prizes, for designs for weavers, calico printers, cabinet- and coach-makers, as well as workers in iron, brass, china, earthenware or ‘any other Mechanic Trade that requires Taste’.

The Society’s committee used the burgeoning daily press to promote its premiums, placing an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser. The prizes were eagerly competed for, and by 1785 nearly twenty entries had been received for premiums for improving the madder dyeing procedure. There had been a number of attempts to shorten and simplify this complex process. Madder produced a turkey-red colour, but only after the fabric to be coloured had been soaked in successive baths of lye, olive oil, alum and dung, then steeped in a solution of the madder dye, then taken through a final ‘brightening’ process. It took weeks to turn out a single batch of dyed fabric. John Wilson, a dyer in Manchester, won a premium in 1761 for producing the best red; then he gained another prize in 1763 for making it even brighter. Others entered with methods to lessen the time the process took, or to lower the cost, or to reduce the number of soakings needed.¹¹

The level of interest in ‘improvement’ throughout society was reflected in the RSA’s membership. Within a few years the numbers belonging to this once clubby club had spiralled up to 2,500, mainly composed of the upper reaches of society, as evinced by a minimum subscription of 2 guineas (with a request for 3 if possible, while peers were expected to live up to their station by paying 5 guineas. Life membership was 20 guineas). The club was for the benefit of the lower orders, but they were not expected to be members. Less than a decade after William Shipley’s crusading pamphet the club’s annual income had risen to more than £4,500, and in that first decade total receipts came to more than £22,000, of which £8,496 had been spent on prizes, £3,507 on special grants, and £291 on art exhibitions. Subcommittees had been set up for agriculture, chemistry and the ‘polite arts’ (that is, drawing, modelling, etching, medallion- and cameo-making), as well as for manufacturing, technology and for matters relating to the colonies and to trade, and were distributing prizes in their own fields.

But the first run of popularity could not be sustained, and by the 1840s the Society was losing members. It was re-formed first as the Society of Arts, and then, in 1847, as the Royal Society of Arts. It began once more to mount exhibitions, this time as a money-making exercise. In 1844 Prince Albert became the club’s president, but when the secretary, Francis Whishaw, attempted to interest him in an annual exhibition, of which he would be patron, he responded in a very non-committal fashion. Whishaw ploughed ahead nonetheless, and put together a committee that included Francis Fuller, Charles W. Dilke and Robert Stephenson. Except for Henry Cole, who was yet to appear on the scene, the men who were to become the prime movers of the Great Exhibition were now all in place.

It was generally agreed by successful middle-class men of taste that the main problem for industry and manufacture in general was the lack of an equivalent level of taste in the consumer to whom the resulting goods were being sold. Rather than producing goods to suit low tastes, they saw it as their job to improve the taste of the common man. The 1847 catalogue for an exhibition held by the Society spelled out their views:

It is a universal complaint among manufacturers that the taste for good art does not exist in sufficient extent to reward them for the cost of producing superior works; that the public prefers the vulgar, the gaudy, the ugly even, to the beautiful and perfect.

We are persuaded that, if artistic manufactures are not appreciated, it is because they are not widely enough known. We believe that when works of high merit, of British origin, are brought forward they will be thoroughly appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed. We believe that this exhibition, when thrown open gratuitously to all, will tend to improve the public taste.¹²

Even before this catalogue appeared, Henry Cole was on board and was already a prime mover in these improving exhibitions. He had joined the society only two years before, after designing a tea service as a prize submission under the pseudonym Felix Summerly. His submission had received the ultimate accolade: a prize, the commercial manufacture of his design, and, further, the purchase of the original service by Prince Albert. Cole was one of those Victorian powerhouses who produced so much, in so many fields, that it is hard to know when he slept. After a humble beginning as one of several clerks in the Record Commission, a junior civil-service post, he fell out with his superior over his pay. Instead of resigning, he promptly exposed his department as a haven for corruption and sinecures. After a lengthy investigation, Parliament found that he was in the right and in 1838 he was reinstated in the department at a more senior level. That same year he was seconded to help Rowland Hill with the creation of what shortly would become the new penny postage system. In the 1840s Cole became even busier: he designed what was probably the first Christmas card (see pp. 483—7); he wrote guidebooks to various tourist sights, including the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey and Hampton Court; as Felix Summerly he began to design domestic wares for manufacture; he wrote children’s books which from 1841 were published as the Home Treasury and were illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day; he designed for manufacture children’s toys that included building blocks, ‘geometrically made, one-eighth of the size of real bricks; with Plans and Elevations’, a ‘Tesselated Pastime’ that was ‘formed out of Minton’s Mosaics with Book of Patterns’, and, what may have been the first paintbox for children, a ‘Colour Box for Little Painters’, which, it boasted, held ‘the ten best colours; Slabs and Brushes; Hints and Directions and Specimens of Mixed Tints’.¹³ In his spare moments he contributed regularly to several periodicals, carrying on his various reforming campaigns in the press and by pamphlets.

One of his campaigns was for railway reform, and it was this that moved him into the next great phase of his life. John Scott Russell, his fellow campaigner, a railway engineer and the editor of the Railway Chronicle, introduced him to the Society of Arts in 1845. By 1846 he was on the committee, and he and Russell had been asked to mount the next exhibition. Russell had earlier put up £50 ‘for a series of models and designs for useful objects calculated to improve general taste’, but not enough people had entered to permit the entries to be exhibited. Cole’s and Russell’s 1847 exhibition faced the same problem: manufacturers, fearing piracy of technique and style, did not want to have their products displayed. But Russell and Cole were determined to draw in enough entries for a good exhibition, and when they managed to attract over 20,000 visitors many manufacturers realized that the enormous potential for sales and promotion far outweighed the slight risk that industrial secrets might be stolen. The following year, instead of scratching around for entries, the Society was forced to devise rules that would limit the number of entries flooding in; this time, 70,000 people flocked to see what was new, what was different, what was interesting.

With that success under his belt, Cole moved on to his next campaign: the staging of another improving exhibition, but this time on a national scale. Albert was even less enthusiastic than he had been with Whishaw three years earlier, refusing either to become involved himself or to approach the government for any formal involvement. Cole was not daunted—Cole was never daunted. The RSA had highlighted the lack of good industrial and domestic design in the country in general, and from commercial manufacturers in particular. Now Cole became involved with a buoyant and popular campaign to promote new schools of design, to be run under government aegis, founding the Journal of Design to promote his cause. A parliamentary commission was set up, loaded with Cole-ites. By the kind of coincidence that Cole was pre-eminent in engineering, its plan—the reform of design and manufacture, and the role of the state in fostering that reform—was exactly what Cole intended his next, national, exhibition should deal with. In the meantime his 1849 RSA exhibition was even more successful than the previous two: Prince Albert agreed to present the prizes, and Queen Victoria gave sovereign approval by loaning an item for display.

For Cole’s grander plan, however, the government, in the way of governments in all places and at all times, offered merely lukewarm enthusiasm—and even that only if private sponsors could be found to guarantee that the costs would be covered. But Albert, sensing the momentum, was now ready to come on board. A Royal Commission was established, with Albert as honorary president, and Cole—never one for half measures—widened the Exhibition’s scope to include the entire world. Thomas Cubitt, the greatest speculative builder of his age, had given a rough estimate for the cost of realizing Cole’s dream: £50,000 for the building costs and £5,000 for administrative costs, with another £20,000 needed for prize money.* A Mr Fuller put up £10,000 for prizes, and the Messrs Munday committed to underwriting the project in return for a percentage of the gate money.

While many discussed the elevating aspects of art, science and education, Cole was promising the businessmen of the City that ‘some hundred thousand people [would] come flowing into London from all parts of the world by railways and steamboats to see the great exhibition’, and that businesses would feel ‘a direct and obvious benefit’ from it. The secretary to the executive committee produced a list of those who could expect to profit: the arts, agriculture, manufacture and trade, ‘whether as producers, distributors or consumers’. To win over popular opinion, advertising was actively used. The Royal Commission sent out placards reproducing a speech that the Conservative leader Lord Stanley—soon to be prime minister as the Earl of Derby—made in favour of the Exhibition, for public display. Posters were printed to put on railwaystation platforms and in trains, and the commissioners arranged for favourable pieces to appear in the papers.¹⁴ The kind of arguments that are now used routinely for the promotion of tourism as an economybooster were developed for the first time: that visitors would arrive, benefiting everyone from hotelkeepers to omnibus operators to food suppliers; that trade would be advertised both to home consumers and to audiences abroad; that, in effect, Britain would be displayed to the world as ‘the emporium of the commercial, and mistress of the entire world’, as the under-sheriff for London put it, rather more poetically than one might expect.¹⁵

Cole’s plans for the Exhibition were growing ever larger, and enthusiasm from the public bodies to whom he spoke was increasing too. He soon realized that hundreds of small investors might fund the Exhibition more lavishly, while demanding far less—or no—overall control. He bought Munday’s out for just over £5,000, and began to solicit the support of local communities across the nation. Thousands of donations began to flood in, with more than 400 groups of merchants, businessmen and industrialists gathering funds and organizing the exhibits to be sent from their own regions. Before 1849 was over, 3,000 subscribers had been signed up; another 3,000 followed less than two months later. Altogether, £522,179 was raised in this way.¹⁶

From the first, however, there was a tension over the aims of the Exhibition. There was no question that Albert saw the Exhibition as ‘a great collection of works of industry and art’, a place to demonstrate how technology had harnessed the natural world to create the Age of the Machine. With this in view, to show how man had become the master of nature, the committee elaborated an initial three-part outline of the subjects to be comprehended by the Exhibition—the raw materials of industry; the products manufactured from them; and the art used to beautify them—into a more formal thirty-section outline:

Sect. I:—Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed:—Classes 1 to 4

1. Mining and Quarrying, Metallurgy, and Mineral Products

2. Chemical and Pharmaceutical processes and products generally

3. Substances used as food

4. Vegetable and Animal Substances used in manufactures, implements, or for ornament

Sect. II:—Machinery for Agricultural, Manufacturing, Engineering, and other purposes and Mechanical Inventions,—illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature:—Classes 5 to 10

5. Machines for direct use, including Carriages, Railway and Naval Mechanisms

6. Manufacturing Machines and Tools

7. Mechanical, Civil Engineering, Architectural, and Building Contrivances

8. Naval Architecture, Military Engineering and Structures, Ordnance, Armour and Accoutrements

9. Agricultural and Horticultural Machines and Implements (exceptional)

10. Philosophical Instruments and Miscellaneous Contrivances, including processes depending on their use, Musical, Horological, Acoustical and Surgical Instruments.

Sect. III:—Classes 11—29.—illustrative of the result produced by the operation of human industry upon natural produce

11. Cotton

12 & 15 [sic]. Woollen and Worsted

13. Silk and Velvet

14. Flax and Hemp

16. Leather, Saddlery and Harness, Boots and Shoes, Skins, Fur and Hair

17. Paper, Printing and Bookbinding

18. Woven, Felted, and Laid Fabrics, Dyed and Printed (including Designs)

19. Tapestry, Carpets, Floor-cloths, Lace, and Embroidery

20. Articles of Clothing for immediate, personal or domestic use

21. Cutlery, Edge and Hand Tools

22. General Hardware, including Locks and Grates

23. Works in Precious Metals, Jewellery, &c.

24. Glass

25. China, Porcelain, Earthenware, &c.

26. Furniture, Upholstery, Paper Hangings, Decorative Ceilings, Papier Maché, and Japanned Goods

27. Manufactures in Mineral Substances, for Building or Decoration

28. Manufactures from Animal and Vegetable Substances, not being Woven or Felted

29. Miscellaneous Manufactures and Small Wares.

Sect. IV: Fine Arts:—Class 30

30. Sculpture, Models, and Plastic Art, Mosaics, Enamels, &c. Miscellaneous objects of interest placed in the Main Avenue of the Building, not classified.¹⁷

Others, however, saw that there was a danger in this kind of display of pure commodity—a danger that the Prince and many organizers had apparently missed. William Felkin, a hosiery and lace manufacturer, and exactly the kind of man who might have been expected to welcome commercial possibilities, was vehement. In his book The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations. Its Probable Influence upon Labour and Commerce he said, ‘This collection of objects from all countries, is not intended to be an Emporium for masses of raw and manufactured goods. These fill the granaries and factories, the warehouses and shops of the world…This is not intended to be a place where goods are to be sold, or orders given; not a bazaar, fair, or mart of business; if so, it would be a perfect Babel. No one could possibly thread his way with comfort, through such a mazy labyrinth.’¹⁸

This was the crux: was the Great Exhibition to be a museum, an exploration of the technology that had created, and been created by, the Industrial Revolution? Or was it to be a supermarket, a display of all the goods, all the commodities, of the age? During the organizational stages the non-commercial, educational aspect seemed to be winning out.

The opening-day ceremonies were not promising to those in the audience who were interested in mercantilism rather than the social whirl. As Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and a staunch republican, noted:

To have rendered the pageant expressive, congruous, and really a tribute to Industry, the posts of honor next the Queen’s person should have been confided on this occasion to the children of Watt, of Arkwright and their compeers (Napoleon’s real conquerors;) while instead of Grandees and Foreign Embassadors [sic], the heirs of Fitch, of Fulton, of Jacquard, of Whitney, of Daguerre, &c., with the discoverers, inventors, architects and engineers to whom the world is primarily indebted for Canals, Railroads, Steamships, Electric Telegraphs, &c., &c., should have been specially invited to swell the Royal cortege. To pass over all these, and summon instead the descendants of some dozen lucky Norman robbers…any of whom would feel insulted by a report that his father or grandfather invented the Steam Engine or Spinning Jenny, is not the fittest way to honor Industry.¹⁹

Lyon Playfair, one of the commissioners, and a confidant of Prince Albert, agreed with Greeley’s views on the virtue of trade, if not with his republican interpretation: he warned that ‘Industry, to which this country owes her success among nations, has never been raised to the rank of a profession. For her sons there are no honours, no recognized social position.’²⁰ He was determined that the Exhibition would alter that.*

This was all part of the series of underlying arguments about the aims of the Exhibition which was still grumbling on. With the arrival of factory production and mass markets, it was no longer clear that labour in itself retained the intrinsic moral value that had previously been attributed to it. Instead, the cheerleaders for the new age saw moral worth as now residing in the creation of goods for the masses. Industriousness and thrift had long been moral values. Now value for money and goods well manufactured joined them. To provide such items for the masses was in itself virtuous, thought Cole and his friends. They were providing the requisites for living a ‘decent’, a ‘respectable’ life—a life that, as closely as possible, both in commodities and in ideals, resembled the norms of the middle-class world. Not everyone agreed in the short term. The older view, that imbued labour itself with value, continued to hold sway for many. Hard work itself could still be considered to be worth more than the products that that work created. For example, a cabinet-maker, Charles McLean, had produced a mirror and console table for the Exhibition, but his local committee had rejected them as being of insufficient quality. He appealed, and Matthew Digby Wyatt, secretary to the executive committee, overruled the original decision, because, he thought, the ‘getting up…was most spirited’—that is, the mirror and table had taken a lot of time and effort to create, and this outweighed the fact that the design and craftsmanship were of indifferent quality.²¹ But the new philosophy, with new values—that of supply and demand, and what the market would bear—was in the ascendant. In the eighteenth century the political economist Adam Smith had seen production as the ‘Wealth of Nations’; now the Great Exhibition saw the wealth of nations in ‘the produce of all nations’. Product was taking over from process.

The Exhibition revolved entirely around the new industrial world, the possibilities that mass production had created. But the interpretation of that new world was still open. Was the Exhibition, therefore, about the value of work, or about the end result of that work—about how something was made, or about what could be purchased? Was it an ideal version of a museum, or was it a proto-supermarket? Was it education, or was it entertainment? What was it for? And for whom?

That the Great Exhibition was, in the widest possible sense, ‘for everybody’ could not be in doubt by the spring of 1851. There were souvenirs for sale across London: an endless stream of items reproducing images of the wildly popular Crystal Palace—items such as papier-mâché blotters, letter-openers and ‘segar’ (cigar) boxes. There were mementoes of specific moments, such as ‘Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition’, a paper cut-out with a perspective view of the main avenue of the Crystal Palace, complete with interior fountain and one of the trees that had been preserved inside the structure (to much admiration from the public for the engineering feat involved). There were handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, including ‘Prince Allbut’. There were even gloves with maps of London printed on the palms, so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them.²² But it was far more than the souvenir market that latched on to the commercial possibilities of the Great Exhibition. There were just as many straightforwardly marketdriven tie-ins as well, such as that promoted by Mr Folkard, ‘Grocer, Tea Dealer and Italian Warehouseman’, who advertised his new ‘Celebrated Exhibition Coffee’, blended from the beans of ‘all nations’, with labels covered with images of foreigners in national dress visiting the Exhibition.²³ Examples of extreme self-reflexivity included exhibitions inside the Crystal Palace which displayed images of nothing less than the Crystal Palace itself. The ‘Cotton’ section had a tablecloth ‘in the centre [of which] is a view of the Exhibition Building…from the official design by Paxton, with emblematic borders representing Peace and Commerce with the nations; and a procession displaying the costumes of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, en route to the Exhibition’.²⁴

But most exhibits were more concerned to display their manufacturers’ technical ingenuity. These were not the type of industrial processes that Albert had put so much faith in. They were not about ‘Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed’. They were instead ‘illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature’. Even here, Albert’s interpretation of the word ‘ingenuity’ and that of the manufacturers were worlds apart. Albert’s faith in the benefits conferred by the material world was interwoven with his belief in providence, social welfare and the moral value of labour. The manufacturers were more overtly concerned to show, through their command of technological innovation, how a new ideal domesticity might be formed, what goods were available that might be acquired, or at least aspired to. A ‘sportsman’s knife’ produced by Joseph Rodgers and Sons of Sheffield had a mother-of-pearl handle and eighty blades, on which were etched views of the Crystal Palace, Osborne House, Windsor Castle, a railway bridge designed by George Stephenson, a boar hunt, a stag hunt and more. The same manufacturer also produced a 56-blade knife that was less than 2 centimetres long, a razor with a view of Arundel Castle on the blade, and cutlery with 150 blades and a clock. A vase by Waterston & Brogden showed Britannia flanked by ‘Scotia’ and ‘Hibernia’, who were in turn surrounded by four heads representing the four quarters of the globe, while under them diamonds in the shape of a rose, a thistle and a shamrock surrounded images of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Normans and

a picture of the Battle of Hastings; under these were a range of national heroes—Nelson, Wellington, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, Watt—all crowned with laurel wreaths, while at the very bottom lurked Truth,

Prudence, Industry and Fortitude.²⁵ Such items were not goods that anyone needed—or would even think of buying. They were advertisements for the manufacturers, which was not at all what Albert had intended.

Other exhibits concentrated on innovations (many involving clothing) that offered relief from almost unimaginable situations: a safety hat for the prevention of concussion in case of a train crash; yachting outfits that had inbuilt flotation devices; corsets that ‘opened instantaneously in case of emergency’; a ‘Patent Ventilating Hat…the principle of ventilating being to admit air through a series of channels cut in thin cork, which is fastened to the leather lining, and a valve fixed to the top of the crown, which may be opened and shut at pleasure to allow perspiration to escape’.* Some promised speed—a doctor’s suit had a coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece, so in a night-time emergency the doctor might leap into them without any waste of time—while others went for economy—a ‘duplexa’ jacket reversed so that it could be worn as both a morning and an evening coat.²⁷ Yet even the most implausible-seeming gimmickry may have had some practical results. Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reformer, dated the cage crinoline (the metal frame that supported what today are referred to as ‘hoop’ skirts) to 1851, rather than the more usual 1854—6, and at least one historian of fashion has suggested that it may have developed from a display model at the Great Exhibition.²⁸

Further items on display that seemed primarily designed to display the manufacturers’ originality included ‘harlequin’ furniture—furniture that served more than one purpose. One of the exhibits was a couch for a steamship which could be turned into a bed at night, while the base, made of cork, acted as a life raft should the worst came to the worst. Should the worst remain only imaginary, the couch had at one end ‘a self-acting washing-stand…containing requisites for the dressing room and toilette’, while the other end enclosed ‘a patent portable watercloset’. Also on show were church pews connected to a pulpit by guttapercha (rubber) pipes, to allow the hard of hearing to listen to the sermon; an ‘expanding hearse’; a silver nose, for those missing a nose of their own; a vase made of mutton fat and lard; an oyster-shucking machine; and a bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.²⁹

Even items with more long-standing recognized functions were not necessarily prized primarily for those functions. Of the thirty-eight pianos in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue to the Exhibition, most were put, logically enough, in the section ‘Philosophical, Musical, Horological and Surgical Instruments’, but two were listed under ‘Furniture, upholstery’, because their papier-mâché cases were considered more important than their sound. Even many of the pianos listed under musical instruments had gimmicks, often to do with the problem of finding space for a grand piano in an average-sized house. Some instruments were simply designated ‘semi-grand’, an acknowledgement that getting a ‘real’ grand piano into a terraced house was like squeezing a quart into a pint pot. Broadwood’s, the most prestigious manufacturer (see pp. 355, 362—3), didn’t worry about such matters—the company knew its customers, and it showed four pianos, all grand. But others, with less exalted clients, who therefore had less grand houses which did not permit equivalently grand pianos, could not be so cavalier. Pierre Erard, who listed himself as ‘Inventor, Designer and Manufacturer’, had a range of sizes to show: ‘ornamented extra-grand; extra-grand with pedal keys; small grand…grand oblique [which from the picture looks like a decorated upright piano], ornamented in the Elizabethan style…grand cottage; reduced cottage…’

Others had more elaborate objects to show. George Frederick Greiner had a semi-grand ‘constructed on the principle of the speaking-trumpet’; while Smyth and Roberts’s piano was ‘on the principle of the violincello’. John Brinsmead was far more worried about appearance than sound, and showed a piano whose ‘case permits the instrument to be placed in any part of the room. Embroidered device in the central panel.’ Another manufacturer enclosed his piano’s workings in plate glass instead of wood; yet another highlighted the case’s ‘paintings of mother-of-pearl on glass’. Richard Hunt meanwhile joined in the general enthusiasm for harlequin furniture. His piano was ‘a dining or drawing room table, [which] stands upon a centre block, or pedestal, and contains a pianoforte (opening with spring-bolts) on the grand principle, with a closet containing music composed by the inventor’. William Jenkins and Son had a ‘registered expanding and collapsing pianoforte for gentlemen’s yachts, the saloons of steam vessels’ ladies cabins, &c.; only 13¹/2 inches from front to back when collapsed’.³⁰ Other manufacturers concentrated on the music student: Robert Allison’s piano had keys that ‘alternated in colour, to show all the scales, major and minor, according to a single rule for each mood, founded on the place of the semi-tonic interval, which renders the seven notes to be touched for an octave of each of the other eleven scales, as evident as the scale of C’; while Robert Addison showed ‘a transposing pianoforte. This piano will transpose music five semitones higher or lower than the written key.’³¹

Even at the time, there was a recognition that gadgetry had got out of hand: the Illustrated London News lamented the displays of ‘a tissue [fabric] which nobody could wear; a carriage in which nobody could ride; a fireplace which no servant could clean if it were ever guilty of a fire; a musical instrument not fit for one in fifty thousand to play; endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them’.³² This brought to the fore the question: were the exhibits designed to show the inevitable march forward to prosperity for all, or would it be more true to say that many exhibitors—and even more of the public—were seeing the Great Exhibition as an enormous advertising site?

The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, reading which was as close as many visitors would get to thinking about the purpose of the fair, claimed in its introduction to be ‘a book of reference to the philosopher, merchant and manufacturer’. Thus, in its own view, it was an educational tool—one that would give instruction to those exhibiting, and also to those many manufacturers in the same field who were not providing exhibits. The catalogue would show these people examples of the best work of their competitors, for them to strive towards. Then, for the many visitors, the catalogue would also explain the new world of technology and design, in layman’s language, to improve their taste. By this means, the customers would be led to demand more of the manufacturers, and this heightened demand for quality would in turn improve the supply.

That was the idea. Carrying it out was another matter. The planning of the exhibits, both in the catalogue and in the actual display halls, had been a mixture of overlapping responsibilities shared between the centralized and local organizations. The local committees had selected the goods to be displayed from their regions or cities, with the barest guidance, in the form of a preliminary outline, from the commission. Once the items were chosen, how they were laid out, and the organizational structure of the hall, were entirely the province of the central body. The planners had originally wanted the Exhibition to represent a schematic re-creation of their thirty-section outline, laying out the state of industrial knowledge before the visitors in map-like form, walking them through the processes by which goods were transformed from raw material, via labour, to finished products. But both because it was not the commission which was making the initial selections and because of the technical requirements of the building, nothing but lip service could ultimately be paid to this didactic aim. The local committees had not necessarily chosen exhibitions that showed each of the processes, and, even when they had, there were power sources in only one part of the north-west axis of the halls, so all the industrial machinery had to be set up there. Then it was realized that the floor of the upper galleries could not bear the weight of heavy machinery, so they became the logical place for lightweight manufactured goods. The central axis or nave, as the main walkway of the Crystal Palace became known, ended up displaying most of the consumer commodities.

The crowds were required to follow specific routes and not able to wander at will. Rather in the way that out-of-town superstores such as Ikea process their customers past high-priced goods or seasonal overstocks, the route down the nave of the Crystal Palace ensured that all visitors passed by the highly finished consumer goods—the goods that were the most superficially attractive, the most entertaining, and the least educational. While the Exhibition stressed abundance and choice—in Prince Albert’s words, ‘The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose’—in fact, the choice had been made already, by the selection committee, by the display committee, and by those guardians of public order who decreed which route the consumers were to take. The visitor had only limited choice about where to go, or what to see.

Henry Mayhew’s comic novel of the Great Exhibition, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition, opened with a paragraph describing the foreigners going round the Crystal Palace. It began, ‘The Esquimaux had just purchased his new registered paletot [a loose, coat-like cape] of seal-skin…The Hottentot Venus had already added to the graceful ebullitions of nature, the charms of a Parisian crinoline.’³³ The humour here is of the simple ‘look-at-the-funny-natives-encountering-civilization-for-the-first-time’ type, but reading this passage today what is noticeable is Mayhew’s unconscious acceptance of the purpose of the Exhibition: the display of fashionable commodities and their subsequent acquisition by the visitors. For it was acquisition that was beginning to hold sway at the Great Exhibition. Horace Greeley had already linked acquisition specifically to an increase in moral good: ‘Not until every family shall be provided with a commodious and comfortable habitation, and that habitation amply supplied with Food and Fuel not only, but with Clothing, Furniture, Books, Maps, Charts, Globes, Musical Instruments and every other auxiliary to Moral and Intellectual growth as well as to physical comfort, can we rationally talk of excessive Production’ (my italics).³⁴ Now it was not merely food and shelter that were considered necessities, but also education, the arts, and physical comfort more generally. Greeley saw clothes, furniture, books, maps and musical instruments all as necessities, all as ‘auxiliaries’ to ‘Moral and Intellectual growth’.

This was a culmination of a gradual process. Over the previous century and a half there had been an enormous change in the way people lived. The architect John Wood, as early as 1749, had listed a number of improvements that had taken place in domestic interiors over the previous quarter-century—improvements that were taken for granted in homes of moderate prosperity by the time he wrote. Cheap floorboards and doors had been replaced by deal and hardwoods and the bare floors covered with rugs, while mahogany and walnut furniture had replaced the previously more customary oak;* rough plasterwork was now hidden behind elegant wood panelling; stone chimney-pieces were replaced by marble, and iron fixtures by brass; while cane and rush chairs were rejected in favour of upholstered leather and embroidered ones.³⁶ Yet even the low base of the 1720s that Wood was looking back to had already seen a big step forward to modern notions of comfort. Indeed, the word ‘comfort’ in the sense of physical and material well-being came into use only in the last third of the eighteenth century. Previously ‘comfort’ had a spiritual and emotional meaning—succour, relief or emotional support. It was in the early nineteenth century that ‘comfort’ in the modern sense became commonplace, and yet only a few decades later Horace Greeley thought it natural to list it as a necessary component of a happy life.

It is hard, in our age of material possessions, and given the stereotypical ‘overstuffed’ image of the late Victorian period, to appreciate from what a bare minimum the acquisition of possessions began. As late as the 1690s, something as basic to us as a utensil to hold a hot drink—that is, a cup—was ‘extremely rare’ even in prosperous households. A mere thirty years later, by 1725, ‘virtually all’ of these households had some.³⁷ We don’t really have any idea of what the poorest in the seventeenth century owned—they died leaving no records. But of those who had enough goods that it was considered worth drawing up an inventory on their deaths, it is illuminating to compare one James Cushman, who died in 1648, with the poorest man listed in the inventories of Sedgley, Staffordshire, ninety years later. Cushman left, in his kitchen, ‘one small iron pott’, ‘a small scillite [skillet]’ and ‘one small brass scimer [skimmer]’. The deceased in Sedgley in 1739 owned, by contrast, a fire shovel, a coal hammer, a toasting iron, a bellows, a copper can, wooden furniture, a ‘tun dish’ or funnel, scissors, a warming pan, a brass kettle, bottles, earthenware, two iron pots, a pail, a ‘search’ or sieve, two old candlesticks, a kneading tub, two barrels, two coffers, a box, some trenchers, pewter, a brass skimmer, a brass basting spoon, an iron meat fork, a tin ‘calender’ or colander, and more.³⁸ A similar increase in the quantity of goods can be found among those with more disposable income: in a survey of 3,000 inventories taken on the death of the head of the household in more prosperous homes, in 1675 half owned a clock; by 1715, 90 per cent of households did.³⁹ This continuous growth in the number of possessions, this concern with the acquisition of goods for the home, was marked enough to be gently satirized in George Colman and David Garrick’s 1784 play The Clandestine Marriage, in which one character announces, ‘The chief pleasure of a country-house is to make improvements.’⁴⁰

These are a few small examples of the marked increase in the number of possessions among all classes, from Garrick and Colman’s countryhouse owners down to those who, in previous ages, would have inherited a few goods, possibly acquired a few more after much struggle, or simply done without. From 1785 to 1800—a mere fifteen years—the rate of consumption of what had previously been considered luxuries and were now regarded as part of the ordinary necessities of life increased at more than twice the rate of population growth. In those fifteen years the population of England and Wales rose by 14 per cent, while over the same period the demand for candles grew by 33.8 per cent, for tobacco by 58.9 per cent and for spirits by a staggering (literally, perhaps) 79.9 per cent, while demand for tea soared by 97.7 per cent and for printed fabrics by an astonishing 141.9 per cent.⁴¹ (For more on tea, see pp. 56—61.)

By the time of the Great Exhibition it was expected that one’s quality of life—one’s standard of living—could be judged by the number of possessions one owned, the number of things one consumed. This was an entirely new way of looking at things. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase ‘standard of living’ dates from 1879. Punch, as always quick to spot a novelty, was already making fun of the idea by 1880. In a George du Maurier cartoon, an ‘Æsthetic Bridegroom’ looks at an oriental teapot, saying to his ‘Intense Bride’, ‘It is quite consummate, is it not?’ She responds rapturously, ‘It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!’⁴² Buying goods, owning goods—even living up to goods—were now virtues. Comfort was a moral good. A hundred years after Colman and Garrick wrote of the prosperous and their country houses, the Illustrated London News carried an advertisement for a piano, the purchase of which would make the ‘home more attractive and save [the family from] more expensive and dangerous amusements’.⁴³ The advertisement could not be more explicit: buying commercially produced goods, in this case a piano, would make one’s family life more entertaining, safer and, somehow, better. This was not simply an advertising conceit. Ford Madox Brown, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, told one of his patrons that, to be happy, ‘much depends upon getting a house and adorning of a beautiful house’.⁴⁴ In 1876 the Revd William Loftie, in A Plea for Art in the House, expanded on this idea: there ‘seems to be something almost paradoxical in talking about the cultivation of taste as a moral duty…[but] if we look on the home here as the prototype for the home hereafter, we may see reasons for making it a sacred thing, beautiful and pleasant, as, indeed, we have no hesitation about making our churches’.⁴⁵ The cultivation of taste had become a ‘moral duty’, with the ‘sacred’ space, the shrine, epitomized by Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which looked like a great shining box built to hold all the commodities that could ever be produced. All the manufactured items in the world seemed to be collected under its transparent lid. It resembled nothing so much as one of those glass domes that Victorians put on their mantelpieces to protect their most precious objects from dirt and dust.

Looking back, it is possible to see, from the beginning, that the tendency to understand the Great Exhibition as a collection of so many items for sale was constantly being repressed. In 1850