The Crystal Palace Experience

E.S. Turner

• The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display by Jeffrey Auerbach
  Yale, 280 pp, £25.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 300 08007 7

If the snappish Ambrose Bierce had been asked to define the word ‘exhibition’, he would probably have said it was an expensive faraway folly to which parents with fractious children journeyed to see a lump of coal, a steam engine and three hundred kinds of wood. As a schoolboy in 1925 I was taken, willingly enough, to Wembley to the British Empire Exhibition, then in its second triumphal year. I have only the fuzziest recollections of Imperial pavilions and palaces of engineering. Dimly, I recall seeing Canada’s life-size statue of the Prince of Wales in butter (‘My legs are too thick,’ he complained) but not Australia’s butter statue of the cricketer Jack Hobbs. I would probably have remembered seeing girls’ skirts being blown over their heads by jets of air had I been allowed anywhere near the amusement park (years later I caught up with this spectacle at Coney Island). What I do remember clearly from this outing is the subsequent evening stroll through the West End, where rich people who could not be bothered to pull the curtains could be seen going about their occasions in lush chandeliered rooms, their outer portals guarded by cockaded menservants. This, I felt, was what life was really about; if such were the rewards of Empire, so be it.