London’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, more familiarly known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition, has come to embody Victorianism considered both as a cultural and as an ideological system. From the building’s construction and design through to the contents of its multiple naves, the whole show brimmed with confidence, faith in progress, and commitment to empire. Over the years, much has been written about the Crystal Palace Exhibition and this collection of essays is a pretty fair representation of many of the central questions that scholars are asking about this event.
The book opens with a brief introduction by Jeffrey A. Auerbach, which insists that ‘Crystal Palace displays were the product not of the organisers’ totalizing vision, but of negotiation and compromise between British organizers and potential exhibitors around the globe’ (p. xiii). The result, Auerbach writes, ‘was a truly global and not just a British event’ (p. xviii). The essays that follow more or less stick with this theme. Paul Young, Kylie Message, and Ewan Johnston interrogate the exhibition for the light that it sheds on Victorian-era globalization as well as on shifting race and class relationships brought about by industrialization and imperial expansion.
The remaining essays explore the world on display at the exhibition. Louise Purbrick writes insightfully about how exhibits of Irish lace, linen, and art reflected deep divisions about Ireland’s national status: ‘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 reclaimed’ (p. 75). Ewan Johnston and Peter Hoffenberg write expansively about New Zealand’s and Australia’s displays, noting how exhibits ‘addressed, although not always reconciled, the often conflicting sources of ethnic political, social, regional, and religious identity’ (p. 120).
Contributors to this volume do not limit their focus to displays from the British Empire. David Fisher connects nineteenth-century Russia’s desire to modernize and be respected by the West with Russian efforts today to host a full-scale, universal-class world expo. Modernization is also the theme of essays by John R. Davis and Debbie Challis about German and Greek exhibits at the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Where German exhibits stressed technology and technology transfer, the Greek exhibit – the first major representation of Greece as an independent nation-state – pegged its modern identity to its classical past (a strategy that continued to unfold at subsequent exhibitions in the reconstructed Crystal Palace in Sydenham). Ambiguity also characterized the representations from Turkey and China, as Francesca Vanke makes clear in her contribution to this volume. Because of England’s strong pro-Ottoman foreign policy, Turkey received relatively positive notice at the exhibition whereas China seemed barely to exist in the eyes of the organizers. The exhibition, it seems, not only reflected dominant attitudes but served to shape them.
Taken on its own terms, this book is an impressive addition to the scholarship on the Crystal Palace and Victorian England. But there are some missing pieces. With the exception of Challis’ treatment of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, there is scant attention paid to the United States and its technologies-R-us representations. Of course, one can find examinations of US exhibits elsewhere, but those exhibits made clear that the shape of the industrial world was changing and that Britain already had a rival with its own ideas about globalization and about which nation should direct the world’s future.
Another missing piece is a conclusion that revisits the main themes addressed by the essays. As it stands, the book has the feeling of an unfinished symphony. Among the issues that might have been addressed by way of conclusion are these: historiography (how the essays in this volume reposition scholars to ask new and better questions about the Crystal Palace); imperial relations (how the exhibition spurred the creation of series of colonial exhibitions in both England and its colonies around the world); museums (how the Crystal Palace stimulated the growth of museums of art, science, and industry, both as agents of globalization and as breakwaters against the tsunami-like effects of industrialization). Finally, when all is said and done about this and the dozens of other universal exhibitions during the Victorian era, there is the matter of the human beings who dedicated no small amount of time and effort to organizing these events. True, other studies have looked at the work of Prince Albert, Henry Cole, and Joseph Paxton, but not within the framework of globalization so nicely constructed by the editors of this book. One can certainly concede that the exhibition was not the result of a ‘totalising vision’ on the part of its organizers, but one should not therefore conclude that these men were lacking vision, especially when it came to building cultural infrastructure that would sustain both British nationalism and imperialism.
In sum, this is a volume that merits notice from scholars working in multiple fields, ranging from the arts to public diplomacy. One can always find fault with any collection of essays, but this collection presents scholarship that is solid and innovative. My hunch is that, because of the price, the book is not likely to find a wide audience. So my hope is that the publisher can, perhaps through e-books, find a way to make these essays available to an increasingly global audience of scholars (and students) who are studying world expos and thinking about these events as staging grounds for globalization.
