London's Great Exhibition of 1851

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33442, 25 January 1974, Page 13

London's Great Exhibition of 1851

London 1851. The Year of the Great Exhibition. By Eric de Mare. The Folio Press. J. M. Dent, Ltd. Unnumbered pages. Illustrated. In Thomas Hardy’s phrase, the year was “a precipice in time". Victorian England was prosperous, selfconfident. powerful, and in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations it created the monument and symbol of its confidence, one which was to sustain the morale of the nation through many troubled years ahead. The story has been told many times before, and Mr de Mare's first excuse for retelling it is that the Exhibition has seldom been viewed in a sufficiently broad social and historical context: his book examines the historical background of the exhibition, the entertainments and displays which took place outside the Crystal Palace, other happenings in

the metropolis, and what he calls the “aftermath” — later exhibitions and building programmes which grew' out of the first. But the main purpose of the book is simply to exhibit the Exhibition, to convey, in a splendid series of pictures, something of the excitement and splendour of London in 1851. Here is the Exhibition as visitors saw it: the engravings and beautiful coloured lithographs, most of them reproduced here (or the first time, are all contemporary, proud Victorian view s of the Victorian accomplishment. Pride is apparent even in the cartoons which affect to mock the brouhaha, like one which shows all the world going to see the Great Exhibition. Many recent works on the Victorian age have emphasised the squalor and inequality of the times; it is pleasant to have one which recalls that it was an era of light as well.