The Great Exhibition and the Historical Antecedents of The Victorian Collecting Mania.

Victorian culture was, of course, the product of many long developments, and I am here concentrating on one which I think is more important than it may so far have been considered: the significance of the prolific collections of material evidence and observations on which the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had sought to base their phenomenological explanations, a program which the Victorians inherited in different ways.

In England, Francis Bacon, writing in the early seventeenth century, produced the first fully articulated rationale for collecting material evidence to verify deductions and explanations: ‘general statements come out, not notional, but well-defined, and such as nature may acknowledge to be really well known to her, and which shall cleave to the very marrow of things… General statements depend on the accumulation of accurate observations and careful experiments’ (Bacon: 119).

The natural philosophers and their ambitious collections

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) described the natural philosophers’ program as the ‘complete discovery of the face of the earth’ (p. xvii) and certainly the breath-taking accumulation of data by post-Baconian natural philosophers, and the astonishing breadth of their interests, was an ambitious attempt to realise the dream which Bacon had articulated in The Advancement of and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605), Instauratio Magna and Novum Organum Scientiarium (1620), The New Atlantis (1627), and Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History (1627).

Robert Jameson (1774-1854), for instance, Regius Professor of Natural History and Keeper of the Museum in the University of Edinburgh, left behind him forty thousand specimens of rocks and minerals, ten thousand fossils, eight thousand stuffed birds and many more insects and flowers. In fact, his first house became so crowded that he had a second house built to accommodate his family! (Gillispie (1951).66). Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) wrote on theology, history, education, politics, psychology, optics, electricity, botany and pneumatic chemistry (ibid. 23). Thomas Young (1773-1829) who succeeded Humphry Davy as Professor at Rumford's Royal Institution, learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldae, and Samaritan, found the principle of hieroglyphic writing through his study of the Rosetta Stone, could grind lenses and turn a lathe, is recognised as a founder of actuarial science, studied physics and physiology, and identified colour-blindness and astigmatism (Gillispie (1960). 411) Finally, Thomas Foster (1789-1860), regarded as one of the founders of meteorology, studied astronomy, mechanics and aerostatics. When he was only sixteen he compiled a weather journal. He also had extensive interests in anatomy, physiology, and phrenology, in colours, the life of birds, his study of the violin, and of the law, his editions of Lieder der Deutschen (Songs of the Germans), of Catu1lus and the original letters of Locke, Shaftesbury and Algernon Sydney which he had inherited, his poems, and his metaphysical treatises. When he fell ill in 1810, his attention was directed to the influence of the atmosphere on health and diseases; in 1811 he took up the study of astronomy after the appearance of a comet, and in 1812 published his Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena. In July 1819 he discovered a comet. Five years later he founded, with Sir Richard Phillips, a Meteorological Society (which lasted only a short while however), returned to his experiments on the influence of the atmosphere on the origins of diseases, especially cholera, and in 1831 made a balloon ascent. Characteristically, he did not omit to publish an autobiography and two volumes of Epistolarum Fosterarium. This is a fragment of his activity. In the catalogue of the Royal Society alone he is represented with thirty-five papers.

Advertising

‘Advertising’ is possibly an appropriate way to describe what Ruskin is doing. For he was living in an age in which advertisers were developing in new directions. As industrial production and the volume of mass produced goods expanded, they responded by moving their operations into spaces which were not available to the general public, such as sessions in which they planned and agreed with the retailers the advertising copy which they would then make available publicly. With this stage complete, the retailers moved into enclosed spaces such as shopping malls and large stores into which they welcomed their would-be customers, and which replaced the public thoroughfare described by Carlyle (146). But then openly advertising and selling your commodities in the streets had long been considered as something rather dirty, hence the connotations of the term sales ‘pitch’. When Ruskin opened a teashop in Paddington Street he refused to put up a sign announcing that he was open for business (Richards. 40). However, he lays out his stall here as an invitation to his readers to enter into the volume which they have bought for their private consumption in the hope that they will be persuaded to share its contents.

The producers, who were often the advertisers, created and supplied a seemingly never ending multiplicity of commodities to ever-expanding markets. Ironically, Ruskin’s presentation of a seemingly limitless multiplicity of natural phenomena and truths uncannily shadows the very developments to which he is so opposed. The irony is clear when you juxtapose Ruskin’s claim that the greater the number of the truths offered in a painting, the greater the painting, with the idea that the greater the supply of commodities on offer, the healthier the market.

Commodities supersede fossils: 1851

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a key moment in the developments I have described. Organisers of and participants displayed a profuse array of functional items, such as ingenious inventions and commodities readily available to those who could afford them, as well as the purely decorative items which were, in some cases, beyond financial value. The significance of this, I suggest, is that the zoological, botanical and geological specimens and fossils had served the cause of expanding human understanding of the world around us, but the commodities served the cause of ever-expanding markets and profits, and, for many, the tangible productions of applied science now ranked far ahead of the theories produced by pure science.

The key elements in Bacon’s thinking as identified by Macaulay - utility and progress - were triumphant as essential constituents of the new capitalist order, and the way in which the generality benefitted (or were supposed to benefit) from the ideas and the inventions of a few is a common feature of both Bacon’s ideal republic and the Victorian social and economic order. But the rulers of New Atlantis have no truck with merchandise. The Governor tells his visitors that his people do not trade in ‘gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other commodity of matter" (Jones: 469). Bacon here does not call into play the full range of the meanings of the word commodity available to him. At the time when he wrote, the word could indeed mean a thing produced for use or sale whose profits which accrued to the owner. Hence, the nascent plantations of the West Indies could be valued in 1630 for the way in which they ‘yeeld an exceeding commodity to this king’, and in 1621, Burton used the word to mean self-interest when he wrote that ‘Commodity is the steer of all their actions’ (see entries in OED). These are the meanings which Bacon is not using here. It has another meaning altogether more in line with the objectives of the mission of the Fathers of New Atlantis, for it was also used in Bacon’s day to refer to something of use or advantage to mankind. The Fathers of Salomon’s House are interested only in this meaning, as for instance the way in which the god Vulcan was credited with being ‘the first that found out the commoditie of fire’ (see entry in OED, 1615), and, to go from the sublime to the domestic, hops used in brewing were described in 1594 as ‘a commoditie of greate and continuall use’. However, it was the first set of meanings which came to predominate and, as I argued above, the British interpreted and developed the key Baconian ideals of utility and progress as something supposedly bettering the human lot in a manner he did not envisage.

Arranging the Exhibition

Since the Exhibition of 1851 was to be a triumphal statement of Britain’s position in the world, the organisers had to decide how to organise the displays of technological achievements, miscellaneous collections of human artefacts, and natural phenomena. Ironically, the way in which they organised the internal space of the Crystal Palace was fully in line with Ruskin’s description of spatial truth in ‘Modern Painters I’ : ‘the state of vision in which all the details of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the least tell what they are, or what they mean…. It is not mist between us and the object…. it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is’ (Chapter 5: “Of Truth of Space”). Richards has argued that in the Crystal Palace, ‘it was impossible to draw the line between the many and various things out on display; in such a space things seemed to lose their distinctness’ (p.31).

There had been a disagreement as to how the Exhibition should be arranged. Prince Albert had initially settled on four main categories: ‘1. Raw Materials. 2. Machinery and Mechanical Inventions. 3. Manufactures. 4. Sculpture and Plastic Art generally’. In this, the Prince followed the example of the natural scientists who labelled, categorised and compartmentalised their materials but, by contrast, the Exhibition’s Commissioners were, as was to be expected, commercially-minded, and they catered for consumers by arranging finished articles departmentally . They were not as systematic as the scientists in their organisation of their materials and by juxtaposing ‘articles of a similar kind from every part of the world’, achieved greater approval from the public than those exhibitors who worked according to Prince Albert’s strict categorisation. This is according to a report in the ‘London Illustrated News’ (June 14th 1851, p. 501).

The Decorative Contents of the Great Exhibition

Since the subject of the Exhibition was not exclusively technological and industrial but included the spoils of empire, the organisers displayed the purely decorative, so repeating the distinction between the Useful and the Beautiful. In 1851, the world's largest known diamond was the Kohi-Noor. This has a spectacular history. Having been mounted on the Peacock Throne, the Mughal throne of India, it was later taken to the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, stolen and taken to Persia, and brought back to the Punjab where the British took possession of it when they conquered the Punjab in 1849. Queen Victoria received it in 1851. At this point, the stone was an astonishing 186 carats. Along with over 2000 other diamonds, the Koh-I-Noor was mounted on the British Crown, proved to be the most popular exhibit on the India ‘stall’ and took its place in a spectacular display of jewelry, which included The Daria-I-Noor, an extremely rare pale pink diamond, and the 8th-century Tara Brooch, discovered in 1850. According to Charlotte Gere, Victoria was shown the famous blue 'Hope' diamond by Mr Hope himself, and after the closing of the Exhibition the Directors of the East India Company presented the Queen with 'a specimen of each of the principal articles exhibited by the Company'. Victoria’s journal records the gift, of 'truly magnificent jewels’ among which were two hundred and twenty four very large pearls, a girdle of nineteen emeralds set round with diamonds, and fringed with pearls, and a collection of rubies one of which she believed to be the largest in the world. A truly satisfied monarch recorded: ‘I am very happy that the British Crown will possess these jewels, for I shall certainly make them Crown jewels' (see Gere). This gift, it must be emphasised, was a (feudal) token of her subjects’ homage to her as the royal head of an ever-expanding empire, and not a (capitalist) commodity. Nor either was the Celtic Revival jewellery exhibited by the Dublin jeweller George Waterhouse. But the decorative sat easily with the equally spectacular display of commodities, which were essentially the products of an economy driven by technological inventiveness.

The Functional and Bacon’s vision: from Atlantis to Crystal Palace

According to the official catalogue, the exhibition celebrated not only the strictly decorative. In this, the organisers behaved in line with Bacon’s vision of the New Atlantis, and, like Bacon, side-lined scientific theory. In The New Atlantis (1627), when Bacon’s mariners arrive at a ‘terra incognita’, their host, the Governor, as I noted above, declares the raison d’être of the House of Salomon: ‘the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (Jones, p. 480).

Not everything which the Governor lists, however, turns out to be equally important. As he develops his account, he leaves behind seeking the ‘knowledge of causes’ and the ‘secret motions of things’ and concentrates instead upon the extension of human control. Small wonder that Macaulay found so much to adulate in Bacon’s work. Pure science comes a poor second to the Governor’s Exhibition of the benefits of what one assumes is authentically applied science. If the applied science of Atlantis has in fact a basis in theoretical scientific work, however, this is something the reader has to take on trust.

Atlantis has a Lower Region consisting of caves which the people use for ‘all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies’ (ibid.).There are also ‘natural mines’ for the production of ‘artificial metals’ whose benefits include curing some diseases and the prolongation of the lives of the cave-dwellers. There are high towers for insulation, refrigeration and conservation as well as astronomical observation (p. 481). The people do not, however, study the workings of the universe as Newton was to, but are concerned with the more practical matter of early warnings of rain, snow or hail. Practical meteorology rather than astrophysics. (But then astrophysics was not developed until nearly three and a half centuries after Bacon died.)

Atlantis, being a fictional Utopia, features a natural abundance. The people have ‘great lakes, both salt, and fresh; whereof (they) have use for the fish and fowl’ (ibid). However, they seem to have no interest in the chemical composition of water. They are concerned with the practical value of their water systems. They have pools which strain fresh water out of salt and others which turn fresh water into salt. They combine nature and human inventiveness in harnessing ‘violent streams and cataracts’ and ‘engines’ which, by intensifying the winds, facilitate mechanical propulsion. However, the Governor offers his guests no details of how the engines ‘facilitate mechanical propulsion’ (pp. 481-2).

They also have ‘Chambers of Health’ which feature body preparations with remarkable properties which can restore your skin from arefaction (dryness) and secure the ‘sinewes, vital parts, and the very juice and substance of the body’ (p. 482). It is easy in reading to forget that this is an august Governor of Salomon’s House and not some cheap-skate Victorian quack!

The Governor now turns to horticulture, and we move from utopian futurism to the early world of botanical experiment. In this activity his people have no truck with the beautiful appearance of their orchards and gardens but are more concerned with the effects produced by grafting and injections, interfering with growth rhythms and growing times, altering sizes, shapes, colours and tastes, experimenting with different kinds of soil and growing without seeds! Inevitably, perhaps, they also produce ‘divers kinds of drinks’ (482-483).

A special arrangement is used for some plants: ‘And many of them we so order, as they become of medicinal use’ (p.483). Actually, the English mariners encounter Atlantis’ herbal remedies before they even set foot on shore. While still aboard, they are greeted by a dignitary who is carrying a fruit which looks like an orange and is used for a protection against infection. Some mariners are sick and they are housed in the Strangers’ House and given sleeping tablets (pp. 454-455). Shortly after Bacon’s image of herbal remedies in his fictional Atlantis, John Rae was in real life cultivating his Cambridge medicinal herbal garden. Bacon also draws on a contemporary development when the Governor expounds on the horticulture of New Atlantis and describes experiments in growing plants without seeds, inventing new species, and converting one plant or tree into another (p.485). This is treading in a fiction on the same dangerous religious minefields as Rae and others did in actual history when their botanical pioneering work dared to call into question hallowed Biblical teaching on the Fixity of Species. They proved to be almost as controversial in their day as Darwin was in his.

As the Governor continues his exposition, the New Atlantis more and more resembles the Great Exhibition. There are the results of applied science: ‘divers mechanical arts…and stuffs made by them; as papers, linen, silks, tissues; dainty works of feathers of wonderful lustre; excellent dies…many of them are grown into use throughout the kingdom’. There are ‘furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats’ and ‘Instruments also which generate heat only by motion’ (p.485).

Not only is Atlantis very advanced in its machinery, it is also highly inventive as regards sight and sounds. Its people have invented ‘perspective-houses’, where they demonstrate ‘all manner of lights and radiations’ and can ‘represent also all multiplications of light, which (they) carry to great distance…as in the heavens and remote places’. They also have developed their multiplications of light to such an extent that they can ‘represent things near as afar off; and things afar off as near’ and have produced ‘glasses’ allowing them ‘to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly (p. 486).

Their innovations in sound technology certainly feature the purely aesthetic. They have ‘sound-houses’ in which they are able to generate a range of sounds: ‘’dainty and sweet’, ‘great and deep’, ‘extenuate and sharp’, ‘tremblings and warblings’. In fact, the Governor claims that they ‘represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds’. They have also developed means for sound transmission, ‘means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances’, and, mindful of one of their main objectives, they have made advances in assisting with partial deafness by developing ‘helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly’ (pp. 486-487). However, the Governor tells his guests/readers what they have achieved but not how .

Bacon now expands on the achievements of his ideal New World, as the Governor continues his litany of successes which, like the Great Exhibition, feature the functional and the decorative. The functional includes

engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions ….swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have: and to make them and multiply them more easily, and with small force, by wheels and other means: and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are; exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks….ordnance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds…. new mixtures and compositions of gun-powder, wild-fires burning in water, and unquenchable…. we have some degrees of flying in the air…ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas; also swimming-girdles and supporters….divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return: and some perpetual motions….a mathematical house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made (pp. 477-478).

Nnot only the useful is being catered for. Like the Great Exhibition, New Atlantis also has luxury goods departments: ‘perfume-houses…. wherewith we…. multiply smells…. imitate smells, making all smells to breathe outs of other mixtures than those that give them’. It also has a confectionery department specialising in ‘all sweet-meats, dry and moist; and divers pleasant wines, milks, broths, and sallets; in far greater variety than you have’ (p.487).

The similarity to the Great Exhibition goes further: ‘We have also precious stones of all kinds, many of them of great beauty, and to you unknown; crystals likewise; and glasses of divers kinds; and amongst them some of metals vitrificated, and other materials besides those of which you make glass. Also a number of fossils, and imperfect minerals, which you have not. Likewise loadstones of prodigious virtue; and other rare stones, both natural and artificial’ (p.486).

Like the French Seigneurs and the Chinese Emperors who exploited the potential of clockwork to create automata, fun toys for those seeking idle sources of amusement, the people of Atlantis have automata which ‘imitate also motions of living creatures, by images, of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents’ and produce ‘a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty’ (p.488). Bacon can little have realised that the British harnessing of clockwork for more practicable things would contribute more than significantly to the British Industrial Revolution, and that using clockwork for toys would handicap the French and the Chinese in their technological development. (Duggan, chap. 4).

Atlantis needs, of course, a governmental structure, and Bacon describes its workings (pp. 488-489). The hierarchy consists of the Fellows of Salomon’s House, each with their areas of responsibility: The ‘Merchants of Light’ (an anticipation of scientists like Charles Darwin) travel to other countries and bring back to Atlantis observations, specimens, ‘the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts’; three ‘Depredators’ collect the experiments which are detailed in the books; three ‘Mystery-Men’ collect ‘the experiments of all mechanical arts; ….of liberal sciences; ….of practices which are not brought into arts’; three ‘Pioneers or Miners’ try out new experiments ‘such as themselves think good’. Their work is scrutinized by the Compilers who catalogue and categorize their experiments ‘to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them’. The work now passes to the ‘Dowry-men or Benefactors’. These examine the others’ experiments and decide not only what is useful and practicable but also what will serve for ‘plain demonstration of causes, means of natural divinations, and the easy and clear discovery of the virtues and parts of bodies’.

Three other groups complete the hierarchy. First, there are the ‘Lamps’ who consider everything achieved to date and ‘direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former’. Secondly, there are the ‘Inoculators’ who carry out the experiments. Finally, there are three ‘Interpreters of Nature’ who ‘raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms’. Again, Bacon describes what happens, but how the ‘Interpreters of Nature’ actually do create ‘greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms’ remains a trade secret, even, one suspects, from Bacon who is, after all, engaged in creating a fiction and not writing a treatise in theoretical and applied science, or, indeed, lecturing on the chemistry of the candle.

The Fellows’ choice of eminent figures whose achievements they have chosen to honour reveal where their priorities are. They have two long galleries. One contains ‘patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions’. In the other they place statues of those who variously invented: ships; ordnance and gunpowder; music; letters; printing; astronomy; works in metal; glass; silk of the worm; wine; corn and bread; sugars (p.p. 489-490).

In a similar manner, the organisers of the Exhibition celebrated inventiveness. Alfred Charles Hobbs, in competitive mode, demonstrated the inadequacy of several respected locks of the day with his own inventions; Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a precursor to today's fax machine; and Mathew Brady was awarded a medal for his daguerreotypes. Visitor would also have seen the world’s first voting machine, a prototype Sam Colt Navy, the Tempest prognosticator (a barometer using leeches), and the first public toilets. These were situated in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace and the public paid a penny for the use of what must have been a most desirable facility!

18. The International Dimension

Just as Atlantis’ Merchants of Light cast a wide net and bring back ideas from around the globe, so the organisers of the Exhibition celebrated the achievements of Britain’s ‘Merchants’ and the openness of a small set of islands off the European mainland to the rest of the world. They put on display such artefacts as gold ornaments and silver enamelled handicrafts fabricated by the Sunar caste from Sind, British India; C.C. Hornung of Copenhagen, Denmark, showed his single-cast iron frame for a piano, the first made in Europe; the ‘Trophy’ telescope was manufactured by Ross of London, and the equatorial mounting, designed by a German team, was made by Ransome & May of Ipswich. The Catalogue notes carefully that the telescope had a main lens of 11 inches (280mm) aperture and 16 feet (4.9m) focal length. In fact, engineering advances occupied a prominent place in the Exhibition. J. S. Marratt, for instance, exhibited a five-feet achromatic telescope and a transit theodolite used in surveying, tunnelling, and astronomical work.

19. Celebrating a marriage between Ancient and Modern

The displays of new technology celebrated contemporary achievement but the Exhibition also featured artefacts from the past, including the ecclesiastical. Two items are of special relevance. They are the ‘Royal folio Bible’, which featured carved wood boards covered with a very fine Turkish produced ‘Moroccan’ leather, and metal mountings which were ‘ornamental’ rather than functional; and the Royal folio Common Prayer Book with its quintessentially English oak boards. Like the Bible, it too had ornamental metal hinges. It also had a clasp, but the catalogue writers were careful to point out that these were the product of electrotype, and according to Whewell, writing in his ‘History of the inductive sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times’ (1837), the Electrotype Process was ‘one of the great powers which manufacturing art employs’ (III. 537).

The advertisers’ descriptions of an Imperial quarto Bible, a Royal quarto altar service, and sundry small Common Prayers and Church Services offered similar benefits from using the new process. In addition to this, the Catalogue’s compilers celebrate the way in which the Electrotype process has preserved some very ancient artefacts. For instance, on Stall 11, some specimens of the Babylonian inscriptions in the British Museum were the ‘first perfect fount of this complicated type ever cast in moveable and combining pieces’. Modern technology then, preserving antiquity.

Commodity Language

The Catalogue’s compilers ensured that the producers had a very prestigious advertising facility. The ‘Designers and Printers, Swainson and Dennys, of 97, New Bond Street, used Stall 21 to advertise: ‘Chintzes for dining-rooms, libraries, &c. Chintz, imitation of drapery, for wall-hangings, curtains, &c; of tree, flowers, drab leaves, &c; of groups of flowers and ribbons; of the acacia; of groups of flowers in rustic panel; and of birds and flowers, for drawing-room curtains, &c. Chintzes suitable for bed-furniture, &c., 26 inches wide’.

Not content with describing the commodity, the producer/advertisers describe how their new technology works. Bacon’s Governor describes what ‘engines’ do but not how. Perhaps they come under the ‘Official Secrets Act’ which he pleads early on. However, Swainson and Dennys have a different audience to impress and a different set of conventions to work by. They are engaged in a sales pitch and they need to convince potential customers that there is indeed a well thought out process at work: ‘Line printing is performed in the following manner: fabric is drawn by power over one or more upper cylinders, the lower part of which revolves containing the color. By an ingenious agent, a blade of steel, or other metal, removes the superfluous color, leaving only the ions on the cylinder charged there with’.

This is a superb example of how commodity speech exploits the impersonal construction. The producers and their promoters describe their own world of processes and implements as if it had a mind of its own and this disguises the human agency responsible for the production.

The description given by Baines in 1835 of the workings of a cotton mill is not at first too far distant from that which Swainson and Dennys give of line printing.

It is by iron fingers, teeth, and wheels, moving with exhaustless energy and devouring speed, that the cotton is opened, cleaned, spread, carded, drawn, roved, spun, wound, warped, dressed, and woven. The various machines are proportioned to each other in regard to their capability of work, and they are so placed in the mill as to allow the material to be carried from stage to stage with the least possible loss of time. All are moving at once the operations chasing each other; and all derive their motion from the mighty engine, which, firmly seated in the lower part of the building, and constantly fed with water and fuel, toils through the day with the strength of perhaps a hundred horses (Baines, p.398).

So far, his description relies on an extensive use of the impersonal construction which disguises human agency as Swainson and his partner do, but Baines is mindful of the men: ‘Men, in the meanwhile, have merely to attend on this wonderful series of mechanism, to supply it with work, to oil its joints, and to check its slight and infrequent irregularities; each workman performing, or rather superintending, as much work as could have been done by two or three hundred men sixty years ago’ (Baines, p. 398).

He is, however, more than merely mindful of the men. He is very much aware of how merely they to attend in the operations of the machines as if they were domestic functionaries. He is also aware of two other things: that the machines are ‘wonderful’ and that they require a much smaller work force.

Baines’ more than implicit acknowledgement that mass industrial processes erase individual creativity, and his use of the commodity speech, with its marked reliance on the impersonal construction, which producers and advertisers had created, support Ruskin’s argument that the responsibility of human beings for the artefacts which human beings have created is being denied. Unlike Ruskin, he is more interested in the savings on employment costs and the splendor of the new machines.

This commodity speech had wide implications encompassing actual artefacts such as Pears’ soaps and their magical cleansing effects, and fictional artefacts such as the portrait to which Dorian Gray assigns responsibility for his own actions and therefore his own guilt.

Baines is aware of its reduction of human beings to functionaries of mechanical production, but he is also very much aware of, and takes a great patriotic pride in what a huge and complex phenomenon mass production in the cotton industry has become and how its complex supply chains have made so many dependent upon it for their livelihood. He offers us a comprehensive account.

fustian-cutters, the sizers, the winders and draw-boys for the hand-loom weavers, the embroiderers of muslins, the machine-makers, the engravers and designers, the makers of steam-engines, cards, rollers, spindles, shuttles, jennies, looms, &c. &c. ; there are all those engaged in the mercantile department in Manchester, Glasgow, and other places, with their clerks and warehousemen ; there are the classes engaged in the packing department, namely, the packers, paper makers, canvass manufacturers, trunk and packing-case makers, &c.; there are the seamen by whom the cotton is imported and the manufactured goods are exported, the carriers by land and water in this country, the porters, &c. There are also considerable numbers of men constantly employed in building the mills and warehouses required for carrying on the manufacture. If all these, most of whom may be regarded as directly employed in the manufacture, could be enumerated, they would swell to an enormous amount. And if we should add those who are employed in aid of the manufacture, namely, the cotton growers in America, India, Brazil, &c.; the workmen in this country who provide the metals, timber, leather, coal, bricks, stone, &c., used for buildings, machinery, implements, and fuel; the agriculturists who grow food for the manufacturing population, and the tradesmen who provide them with the necessaries of life; all of whom are unquestionably supported by the cotton manufacture of Great Britain, and would be thrown out of bread by its failure; the importance of this vast branch of productive industry would then rise in our estimation to its just magnitude, and would much exceed the calculations usually made of the capital it employs and the population it maintains (Baines, p. 397).

As I read through this passage, I am aware that yet again I am reading an author who substantiates his arguments by accumulating a multiplicity of examples which becomes almost tedious to read in its obsessiveness. There is also a simmering sub-text ready to boil over in a manner which is anticipated by the phrases ‘an enormous amount’ and ‘vast branch of productive industry’ which are merely curtain-raisers to a triumphalist celebration.

When it is remembered that all these inventions have been made within the last seventy years, it must be acknowledged that the cotton mill presents the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature, of which modern times can boast. That this vast aggregate of important discoveries and inventions should, with scarcely an exception, have proceeded from English genius, must be a reflection highly satisfactory to every Englishman (Baines, p.244).

Patriotic pride is a fine horse to ride but not if it distracts you from or devalues the importance to you of the majority of your fellow-countrymen enjoying a secure living with decent wages.

Images of Enduring Power

On Stall19 of the Exhibition, Ball, Dumnicliffe, & Co., Nottingham, while seemingly honest about the design of their products, in fact use commodity language in their promotional materials. In their textile fabrics, natural flowers are represented under conventional forms, so that, as it would seem, there is no departure from the original and an avoidance of the pictorial. They assign the origins of their avoidance of raised ornamentation to non-human agencies. So it is that it is Eastern Chintzes which featured ‘but fantastic imitations of flowers’. So too the ‘pure taste’ of ‘classical Greece’ kept female dress free from any ornamentation save ‘that of a flat character’ or ‘flat’ borders of vine, ivy-leaf or homey-suckle’.

The Company also support their design program with reference to an eclectic selection continuing the internationalist emphasis: Persian and Turkish carpets, the Scottish Tartan, Classical Roman dress, and Moorish decoration which lack nothing in luxurious quality but are examples of a flat as opposed to a raised or embossed and pictorial ornamental style. However, not everyone shared their preference for flat ornamentation.

No one could doubt the arrival of a new and devastating commercial power. But the Exhibition also celebrated an ancient and venerable power to whose symbolic signification raised ornamentation was a key factor. One outstandingly popular exhibit was a State chair of ruby colored silk, embroidered with gold, silver and jewels. But on the back were the royal arms with a wreath of flowers ‘in which the rose leaves are raised and detached from the surface’. The use of relief work in such a presentation is, of course, a special visual language designed to enhance the significance of what the designer is depicting.

Glamorizing the domestic.

The producers, motivated by the need to sell their commodities, glamorized the homely, the mundane, and the downright demotic as part of the spectacle: a knife and fork with ‘ivory handles 58 inches long’; blades ‘etched with different views’; a razor with ‘a cocoa-wood handle’, the blade engraved with a view of Arundel castle; fruit-knives and forks ornamented in plated metal.

A Sheffield manufacturer displayed an assortment of shoes for butchers, cooks, and weavers, as well as an assortment of knives for bakers, painters, glaziers and farriers. Their display cohered only through the physical nature of the objects, not their miscellaneous users. But a manufacturer from ‘Wolver-Hampton’ offered a collection of commodities for one specialist activity - cuisine: jelly moulds; steak and fish dishes; soup tureens; kettles and stands; coffee machines; tea-pots; cheese toasters; egg poachers; wine strainers; spice boxes, &c. - ‘What, wilt the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’

Officially Utopia.

The Utopian vision of the world which the organizers of the Exhibition offered the public was certainly triumphant and THE WORLD’S FAIR OR, THE CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1851 presented a very sanitised view of the Exhibition as reflecting what we can see today as far from Utopian: ‘The Great Exhibition is intended to receive and exhibit the most beautiful and most ingenious things from every country in the world, in order that everybody may become better known to each other than they have been, and be joined together in love and trade, like one great family; so that we may have no more wicked, terrible battles, such as there used to be long ago, when nobody cared who else was miserable, so that they themselves were comfortable’.

There were, however, Victorian writers, notably Dickens and Wilde, who saw their world differently and produced dystopian visions of Victorian accumulations of objects and their power to control and destroy human lives.

The Functional

According to the Official Catalogue, the Exhibition celebrated not only the strictly decorative. Alfred Charles Hobbs, in competitive mode, demonstrated the inadequacy of several respected locks of the day with his own inventions; Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a precursor to today's fax machine; and Mathew Brady was awarded a medal for his daguerreotypes. Visitor would also have seen the world’s first voting machine, a prototype Sam Colt Navy, the Tempest prognosticator (a barometer using leeches), and the first public toilets. These were situated in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace and the public paid a penny for the use of what must have been a most desirable facility!

The International Dimension

The organisers celebrated this in their displays of such artefacts as gold ornaments and silver enamelled handicrafts fabricated by the Sunar caste from Sind, British India; C.C. Hornung of Copenhagen, Denmark, showed his single-cast iron frame for a piano, the first made in Europe; the ‘Trophy’ telescope was manufactured by Ross of London, and the equatorial mounting, designed by a German team, was made by Ransome & May of Ipswich. The Catalogue notes carefully that the telescope had a main lens of 11 inches (280mm) aperture and 16 feet (4.9m) focal length. In fact, engineering advances occupied a prominent place in the Exhibition. J. S. Marratt, for instance, exhibited a five-feet achromatic telescope and a transit theodolite used in surveying, tunnelling, and astronomical work

Celebrating a marriage between Ancient and Modern

The displays of new technology celebrated contemporary achievement but the Exhibition also featured artefacts from the past, including the ecclesiastical. Two items are of special relevance. They are the ‘Royal folio Bible’, which featured carved wood boards covered with a very fine Turkish produced ‘Moroccan’ leather, and metal mountings which were ‘ornamental’ rather than functional; and the Royal folio Common Prayer Book with its quintessentially English oak boards. Like the Bible, it too had ornamental metal hinges. It also had a clasp, but the catalogue writers were careful to point out that these were the product of electrotype, and according to Whewell, writing in his History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837)the Electrotype Process was ‘one of the great powers which manufacturing art employs’. (III. 537.).

The advertisers’ descriptions of an Imperial quarto Bible, a Royal quarto altar service, and sundry small Common Prayers and Church Services offer similar benefits from using the new process. In addition to this, the Catalogue’s compilers celebrated the way in which the Electrotype process had preserved some very ancient artefacts. For instance, on Stall 11, some specimens of the Babylonian inscriptions in the British Museum were the ‘first perfect fount of this complicated type ever cast in moveable and combining pieces’. Modern technology then, preserving antiquity.

Commodity Language:

The Catalogue’s compilers ensured that the producers had a very prestigious advertising facility. The ‘Designers and Printers, Swainson and Dennys, of 97, New Bond Street’ used Stall 21 to advertise

Chintzes for dining – rooms, libraries, &c. Chintz, imitation of drapery, for wall – hangings, curtains, &c; of tree, flowers, drab leaves, &c; of groups of flowers and ribbons; of the acacia; of groups of flowers in rustic panel; and of birds and flowers, for drawing – room curtains, &c. Chintzes suitable for bed-furniture, &c., 26 inches wide’.

Not content with describing the commodity, the producer/advertisers were careful to describe the mechanical working of their new technology as part of their sales pitch:

‘Line printing is performed in the following manner: fabric is drawn by power over one or more upper cylinders, the lower part of which revolves containing the color. By an ingenious agent, a blade of steel, or other metal, removes the superfluous color, leaving only the ions on the cylinder charged there with’.

This is an excellent example of how the advertisers with their commodity speechexploited the impersonal construction. The producers and their promoters described their own world of processes and implements as if it had a mind of its own and this disguised the human agency responsible for the production. Ruskin was opposed to the mass industrial processes which he saw as destroying individual creativity, and erasing traces of the characters of the individual artisan in the ‘finished’ article. The commodity speech which the producers and advertisers developed denied the responsibility of human beings for the artefacts which they had created, even if they had been merely machine operatives. This ‘creative’ use of language had wide implications encompassing actual artefacts such as Pears’ soaps and their magical cleansing effects, and fictional artefacts such as the portrait to which Dorian Gray assigns responsibility for his own actions and therefore his own guilt. The tradition has continued until the present. It is, for instance, modern cleaning products which magically drive out dirt and kill germs. This is not a topic which I need to expound. Others have done a far better job than I ever could (see Barthes: 2009)

On Stall 19 of the Exhibition, Ball, Dumnicliffe, & Co., Nottingham, while seemingly honest about the design of their products, in fact used commodity language in their promotional materials. In their textile fabrics, they represented natural flowers under conventional forms, so that, as it would seem, they did not depart from the original and avoided the pictorial. In so doing, they assigned the origins of their avoidance of raised ornamentation to non-human agencies. So it is that it was Eastern Chintzes which featured ‘but fantastic imitations of flowers’. So too the ‘pure taste’ of ‘classical Greece’ kept female dress free from any ornamentation save ‘that of a flat character’ or ‘flat’ borders of vine, ivy-leaf or homey-suckle.

The company also supported their design program with reference to an eclectic selection continuing the internationalist emphasis: Persian and Turkish carpets, the Scottish Tartan, Classical Roman dress, and Moorish decoration which lacked nothing in luxurious quality but were examples of a flat as opposed to a raised or embossed and pictorial ornamental style. However, not everyone shared their preference for flat ornamentation.

Images of Enduring Power

No one could doubt the arrival of a new and devastating commercial power. But the Exhibition also celebrated an ancient and venerable power to whose symbolic signification raised ornamentation was a key factor. One outstandingly popular exhibit was a State chair of ruby colored silk, embroidered with gold, silver and jewels. But on the back were the royal arms with a wreath of flowers ‘in which the rose leaves are raised and detached from the surface’. The use of relief work in such a presentation was, of course, a special visual language designed to enhance the significance of what the designer was depicting.

Glamorizing the domestic

The producers even glamorized the status of the homely, the mundane and downright demotic as part of the spectacle: a knife and fork with ‘ivory handles 58 inches long’; blades ‘etched with different views’; a razor with ‘a cocoa-wood handle’, the blade engraved with a view of Arundel castle; fruit-knives and forks ornamented in plated metal.

A Sheffield manufacturer displayed an assortment of shoes for butchers, cooks, and weavers, as well as an assortment of knives for bakers, painters, glaziers and farriers. Their display cohered only through the physical nature of the objects, not their miscellaneous users. But a manufacturer from Wolverhampton offered a collection of commodities for one specialist activity - cuisine: jelly moulds; steak and fish dishes; soup tureens; kettles and stands; coffee machines; tea-pots; cheese toasters; egg poachers; wine strainers; spice boxes, &c. - ‘What, wilt the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’

The Utopian abundance of the world which the organizers of the Exhibition offered the public was certainly triumphant. However, THE WORLD’S FAIR OR, THE CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1851 presented a very sanitised view of the Exhibition as reflecting what we can see today as far from Utopian:

The Great Exhibition is intended to receive and exhibit the most beautiful and most ingenious things from every country in the world, in order that everybody may become better known to each other than they have been, and be joined together in love and trade, like one great family; so that we may have no more wicked, terrible battles, such as there used to be long ago, when nobody cared who else was miserable, so that they themselves were comfortable.

There were, however, Victorian writers, notably Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, and Wilde, who saw their world differently and produced Distopian visions of Victorian accumulations of objects and their power to control human lives.

Other parts of “Francis Bacon, Inductive Science, Empire, & the Great Exhibition”

Select Bibliography

Note: Since I have relied on the Gutenberg online text of the Official Catalogue of the 1851 Exhibition I have been unable to cite page references.

Bacon, Sir Francis: Selections from the works of Lord Bacon: ed. by Moffett . Dublin University Press, 1847.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies London: Vintage Classics, 2009.

Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London: Harmondsworth, 1968.

Darwin, Charles. Naturalists’s Voyage Round The World. London: John Murray: 1890.

Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

Gere, Charlotte “The Exhibition Years.” The Victorian Web.

Gillispie,Charles. The Edge of Objectivity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.

Gillispie, Charles. Genesis and Geology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.

The London Illustrated News.

Ray, John:Historia Plantarum Historia Plantarum (1686-1704 ). p class="bibl”>Richards, Thomas: The Commodity Culture of Victorian England.Stanford: Stanford University Press: Verso edition 1991.

Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn.Library Edition: London: George Allen: 1903–12.

Whewell, William. History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times. 1837.

THE WORLD’S FAIR: OR, CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITIONGutenberg: Release Date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #14092]


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Last modified 12 July 2017