The Great Exhibition of 1851 – Our Next Event
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Our next event is on 9th November at 7.30 in The Parish Room, Little Waldingfield.
Local Historian Geoffrey Kay will portray for us the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was the first international exhibition of works of industry of all nations and the first in a series of World Fairs of culture and industry that became popular in the 19th Century. It was organised by Henry Cole and Prince Albert, held in the purpose built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park and attended by numerous notable figures of the time, including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot and Alfred Tennyson.
The mid 19thC was a time when Britain lead the field in many ways, particularly iron and steel, machinery and textiles, and especially where strength, durability, utility and quality of items were concerned. It was hoped the exhibition would provide the world with hope of a better future (Europe had just struggled through two difficult decades of political and social upheaval) and Britain hoped to show that technology, particularly its own, was the key to this better future.
By the time the Exhibition closed on 11 October, over six million people, more than 20% of the population (*) had gone through the turnstiles in a little under six months. Many of the objects in the Exhibition were used as the first collection for the South Kensington Museum which opened in 1857, later becoming the Victoria and Albert Museum. Instead of the loss initially predicted, the Exhibition made a profit of £186,000, most of which was used to create the South Kensington museums which became Albert’s memorial, along with his statue, sitting under a gilt canopy opposite the Royal Albert Hall with a copy of the Exhibition catalogue on his knee.
(*) In 1851 the population of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland was just 27 million.
I for one wish that I had seen the Great Exhibition in person – words cannot adequately describe how truly amazing it must have been at the time.
Geoffrey’s talk is going to be exquisite and should not be missed; I will try to capture its flavour in my subsequent review, but this will likely be a poor imitation.
Tickets for our forthcoming fund raising concert by the Bury Male Voice Choir (with Classic Femme) on Saturday 19th in St Lawrence will also be available for sale, but if you are unable to make the talk and would like concert tickets, please contact Sue (247980) or Diana (248298).
Trustees look forward to seeing many of you soon.
This entry was posted on November 3, 2016 at 11:08 am and is filed under LWHS, Oral / Social History, Presentations with tags 1851, Albert, Crystal, Exhibition, Great, Kensington, Palace, Victoria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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