Fisher, Nick (Author)
Despite efforts to lay out the Great Exhibition in a rational arrangement, it was so vast and variegated and overwhelming in its single 18-acre building that it was literally indescribable. Robert Hunt in his Synopsis argued that every visitor needed to find a thread -- any thread -- through the labyrinth; but this proved elusive, even for professional journalists, who must overall be judged to have failed. With description impossible, journalists tried other strategies, notably epistolary form, and also fiction, which excused the writer from providing any more than a few personal impressions. The legacy of the Exhibition is ambiguous: judged at the time an overwhelming success, it proved to be all too easily forgettable and ephemeral. On the face of it, the aims of the Great Exhibition of 1851 were clear enough. `Great Britain offers a hospitable invitation to all the nations of the world, to collect and display the choicest fruits of their industry in her Capital', wrote Henry Cole in the first paragraph of the official catalogue [1]. He fleshed out this invitation by quoting at length Prince Albert's famous rhetorical performance of March 1850 at a formal dinner at the Mansion House to promote the show, in the presence of the foreign ambassadors and all the important mayors of the kingdom: progress in knowledge and science was an unbreakable duty imposed by God on man; the exhibition would encourage this progress by fostering a judicious mixture of friendly competition and international cooperation centred on a sort of league of nations. The exhibition would also serve as a baseline against which future progress could be measured, `a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions'. Domestically, the aim was largely educational, to bring about improvement in taste both among the public and -- even more important -- in British design and manufacture. Shortly after the triumphant Opening of the exhibition on the First of May 1851, the first of many guidebooks appeared (Figure 1).
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