The Victorian Era

What Was the Great Exhibition of 1851

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851, was the first international exhibition of manufactured products. It attracted over six million visitors, displayed the products of more than 13,000 exhibitors, and made a profit of £186,000 that was used to found the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the Imperial College of Science. The exhibition was proposed by Henry Cole, championed by Prince Albert, and housed in the revolutionary iron-and-glass building designed by Joseph Paxton that became known as the Crystal Palace. The Great Exhibition is part of the wider history of Victorian Science, Invention, and Technology and of the British Empire in the Victorian Era.

The Origins of the Exhibition

The idea of a great national exhibition of industry was first proposed in 1845 by Henry Cole, the civil servant and reformer who had been a member of the Board of Trade and who would later found the South Kensington Museum. Cole had visited the great French industrial exhibitions of the 1840s, and he argued in the Journal of Design and Manufactures that Britain needed a similar event to showcase its own products. The proposal was taken up by Prince Albert, who had been appointed President of the Society of Arts in 1843, and by a group of leading politicians, industrialists, and reformers, including the engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Whitworth, the former prime minister Robert Peel, and the Whig leader Lord John Russell. The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 was established by Royal Charter in January 1850, with Prince Albert as President, the engineer William Cubitt as Chairman of the Executive Committee, and the civil servant Henry Cole as one of the joint general secretaries.

The Commission faced a formidable logistical challenge. An exhibition building had to be designed, the exhibits had to be selected, the exhibitors had to be invited, the visitors had to be accommodated, and the financial risk had to be managed. The Commission decided to raise the necessary capital of £236,000 by issuing 1,000 £100 shares, which were subscribed five times over by a wide range of investors from cotton spinners to bishops, and to repay the loans from the proceeds of the exhibition. The Commission also decided that the exhibition should be international, and invitations were sent to the leading industrial nations of the world. By the time the exhibition opened, more than 13,000 exhibitors had been accepted, from Britain, from the British colonies and dependencies, and from over thirty foreign countries, including France, the United States, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Ottoman Empire. The foreign exhibitors took some 39 per cent of the exhibit space.

The Crystal Palace

The exhibition building, the Crystal Palace, was the work of the gardener and architect Joseph Paxton, the head gardener at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Paxton had designed a glasshouse to house the giant water lily of the Amazon at Chatsworth, and he proposed a building on the same principle, a vast iron and glass structure, to house the exhibition. Paxton’s design was accepted in June 1850 after a competition in which 245 designs had been submitted, and it was built in just nine months, between August 1850 and March 1851, by the engineering firm of Fox, Henderson and Company, using 293,000 panes of glass, 1,700 iron columns, and 24 miles of guttering. The building was 1,851 feet long, equal to the year of the exhibition, 408 feet wide, and 108 feet high, and it covered 19 acres of Hyde Park. The Crystal Palace was constructed in just nine months, and it was the largest building in the world at the time of its construction.

The interior of the Crystal Palace was laid out in a long nave, with transepts and courts for the various national sections. The British section was by far the largest, occupying nearly half of the total floor space, and the exhibits ranged from the latest steam engines and machine tools to the fine arts, the decorative arts, and the consumer goods. The foreign sections were equally impressive, with the French and the American displays drawing particular attention. The most famous exhibits included the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the massive Indian diamond set in the new crown of Queen Victoria; the industrial displays of the British manufacturers; the prints and the porcelain of the French displays; and the reaper of Cyrus McCormick, the American agricultural machine that was to transform the grain harvest of the world. The exhibition was a sensation, and the Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word of the day described the occasion in detail. The Crystal Palace was the most spectacular example of Victorian Architecture and Interior Design of the period, and it was a powerful demonstration of the new industrial capacity of the Victorian Economy and Industrialization.

The Visitors and the Aftermath

The exhibition was an immediate public success. The first day, 1 May 1851, was attended by the Royal Family, the diplomatic corps, and a throng of well-dressed visitors, and the first great crush of ordinary visitors came on the second day, the day reserved for the middle and working classes. The famous six-millionth visitor was recorded on 28 September 1851, and the final total of 6,039,195 visitors, including the season ticket holders, was about a third of the population of the United Kingdom. The admission price was one shilling, or £1 for the season, and a large proportion of the visitors came on the specially subsidised railway excursions from the industrial towns of Lancashire, the Midlands, and Yorkshire. The Crystal Palace itself was dismantled after the exhibition and re-erected at Sydenham Hill in south London, where it stood until it was destroyed by fire on 30 November 1936.

The success of the exhibition led to a long series of international exhibitions: the 1853 New York, 1855 Paris, 1862 London, 1867 Paris, 1873 Vienna, 1876 Philadelphia, 1878 Paris, 1889 Paris, 1893 Chicago, and 1900 Paris. The profits of the London exhibition of 1851, some £186,000, were used to purchase the 87-acre site in South Kensington that had been the No. 1 site of the exhibition. The new South Kensington Museum, later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum, was founded in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures, the Natural History Museum opened in 1881, the Science Museum opened in 1857, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology, founded in 1907, completed the South Kensington complex. The story of the Crystal Palace and its successors is part of the wider history of Victorian Architecture and Interior Design, and the buildings that the profits funded are among the great Victorian Buildings and Landmarks of the period.

The Economic and Cultural Effect

The Great Exhibition had important effects on the British economy, on the British consumer, and on the British public sphere. The exhibition introduced the British public to a wide range of new products, from the new industrial machines to the new consumer goods, and it helped to create a national market for the products of British industry. The exhibition was also a powerful demonstration of the new industrial capacity of the British economy, and it helped to consolidate the position of the leading industrialists of the period. The many imitators of the exhibition, in New York, in Paris, in Vienna, and in Philadelphia, were the model for the great international exhibitions of the next half-century, and the concept of the world fair remains a powerful one to the present day. The story of the exhibition is part of the wider history of Victorian Daily Life and Society, and it remains one of the defining events of the Victorian era.